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WHAT IS COMING ? 



MR. WELLS has also written 

The following Novels : 

LOVE AND MB. LEWISHAM 

KIPPS MR. POLLY 

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 

ANN VERONICA MARRIAGE 

TONO BUNGAY BEALBY 

THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS 

THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMON 

THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

Numerous short stories collected 
under the titles 

THIRTY STRANGE STORIES 
TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM 

The following fantastic and imag- 
inative Romances : 

THE TIME MACHINE 
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS 
THE SEA LADY 
THE WONDERFUL VISIT 
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET 
THE SLEEPER AWAKES 
THE FOOD OF THE GODS 
THE WAR IN THE Am 
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON 
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU 
and THE WORLD SET FREE 

A series of books upon social and 
political questions of which 

ANTICIPATIONS (1900) 
A MODERN UTOPIA 
FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELI- 
GION AND PHILOSOPHY) 
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA 

and social forces in England and 

AMERICA 

are the chief. And two little 
books about children's play 
called 

FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS 



WHAT IS COMING? 

A European Forecast 



BY 

H. G. WELLS 



!N>ro Hark 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1916 



-J}S22> 



Copyright 191« 
Bt THE CURTIS PUBLISHING CO. 

Copyright 1916 

By H. G. WELLS 

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1916 




MAY 26 1916 



'CI.A433161 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Forecasting the Future 1 

II The End of the War 29 

III Nations in Liquidation 50 

IV Braintree, Booking, and the Future op 

the World 76 

V How Far Will Europe Go Towards So- 
cialism? 96 

VI Lawyer and Press 125 

VII The New Education 148 

VIII What the War Is Doing for Women . . 159 

IX The New Map of Europe 189 

X The United States, France, Britain, and 

Russia 215 

XI " The White Man's Burthen " . . .238 

XII The Outlook for the Germans .... 263 



WHAT IS COMING? 

I 
FORECASTING THE FUTURE 

Prophecy may vary between being an intellec- 
tual amusement and a serious occupation; serious 
not only in its intentions, but in its consequences. 
For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or dis- 
appoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, 
who have been touched with the spirit of science, 
prophesying is almost a habit of mind. Science is 
very largely analysis aimed at forecasting. The 
test of any scientific law is our verification of its 
anticipations. The scientific training develops the 
idea that whatever is going to happen is really here 
now — if only one could see it. And when one is 
taken by surprise the tendency is not to say with 
the untrained man, " Now, who'd ha' thought it? " 
but " Now, what was it we overlooked? " 

Everything that has ever existed or that will 
ever exist is here — for any one who has eyes 
to see. But some of it demands eyes of superhu- 



2 WHAT IS COMING? 

man penetration. Some of it is patent; we are 
almost as certain of next Christmas and the tides 
of the year 1960 and the death before 3000 A. D. of 
everybody now alive as if these things had already 
happened. And below that level of certainty, but 
still at a very high level of certainty, there are 
such things as that men will probably be making- 
aeroplanes of an improved pattern in 1950, or that 
there will be a through railway connection between 
Constantinople and Bombay and between Baku 
and Bombay in the next half-century. And from 
such grades of certainty as this one may come 
down the scale until the most obscure mystery of 
all is reached : the mystery of the individual. Will 
England presently produce a military genius, or 
what will Mr. Belloc say the day after to-morrow? 
The most accessible field for the prophet is the 
heavens; the least is the secret of the jumping cat 
within the human skull. How will so-and-so be- 
have, and how will the nation take it? For such 
questions as that we need the subtlest guesses of 
all. 

Yet even to such questions as these the sharp, 
observant man may risk an answer with something 
rather better than an even chance of being right. 

The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 3 

He is more interested in to-morrow than he is in to- 
day, and the past is just material for future guess- 
ing. " Think of the men who have walked here ! " 
said a tourist in the Roman Coliseum. It was a 
Futurist mind that answered : " Think of the men 
who will." It is surely as interesting that pres- 
ently some founder of the World Republic, some ob- 
stinate opponent of militarism or legalism, or the 
man who will first release atomic energy for human 
use, will walk along the Via Sacra as that Cicero 
or Giordano Bruno or Shelley have walked there 
in the past. To the prophetic mind all history is 
and will continue to be a prelude. The prophetic 
type will steadfastly refuse to see the world as a 
museum ; it will insist that here is a stage set for a 
drama that perpetually begins. 

Now this forecasting disposition has led the 
writer not only to publish a book of deliberate 
prophesying, called Anticipations, but almost with- 
out premeditation to scatter a number of more or 
less obvious prophecies through his other books. 
From first to last he has been writing for twenty 
years, so that it is possible to check a certain pro- 
portion of these anticipations by the things that 
have happened. Some of these shots have hit re- 
markably close to the bull's-eye of reality ; there are 



4 WHAT IS COMING? 

a number of inners and outers, and some clean 
misses. Much that he wrote about in anticipation 
is now established commonplace. In 1894 there 
were still plenty of sceptics of the possibility either 
of automobiles or aeroplanes ; it was not until 1898 
that Mr. S. P. Langley (of the Smithsonian Insti- 
tution) could send the writer a photograph of a 
heavier-than-air flying machine actually in the air. 
There were articles in the monthly magazines of 
those days proving that flying was impossible. One 
of the writer's luckiest shots was a description (in 
Anticipations in 1900) of trench warfare, and of a 
deadlock almost exactly upon the lines of the situa- 
tion after the battle of the Marne. And he was for- 
tunate (in the same work) in his estimate of the 
limitations of submarines. He anticipated Sir 
Percy Scott by a year in his doubts of the decisive 
value of great battleships (see An Englishman 
Looks at the World) ; and he was sound in denying 
the decadence of France; in doubting (before the 
Russo-Japanese struggle) the greatness of the 
power of Russia, which was still in those days a 
British bogey ; in making Belgium the battleground 
in a coming struggle between the mid-European 
Powers and the rest of Europe ; and (he believes) in 
foretelling a renascent Poland. Long before Eu- 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 5 

rope was familiar with the engaging personality of 
the German Crown Prince, he represented great air- 
ships sailing over England ( which country had been 
too unenterprising to make any) under the com- 
mand of a singularly anticipatory Prince Karl, and 
in The World Set Free the last disturber of the 
peace is a certain " Balkan Fox." In saying, how- 
ever, here and there that "before such a year so- 
and-so will happen," or that " so-and-so will not oc- 
cur for the next twenty years," he was generally 
pretty widely wrong; most of his time estimates 
are too short; he foretold, for example, a special 
motor track apart from the high road between Lon- 
don and Brighton before 1910, which is still a 
dream, but he doubted if effective military aviation 
or aerial fighting would be possible before 1950, 
which is a miss on the other side. He will draw a 
modest veil over certain still wider misses that the 
idle may find for themselves in his books ; he prefers 
to count the hits and leave the reckoning of the 
misses to those who will find a pleasure in it. 

Of course, these prophecies of the writer's were 
made upon a basis of very generalised knowledge. 
What can be done by a really sustained research 
into a particular question — especially if it is a 
question essentially mechanical — is shown by the 



6 WHAT IS COMING? 

work of a Frenchman all too neglected by the 
trumpet of fame — Clement Ader. M. Ader was 
probably the first man to get a mechanism up into 
the air for something more than a leap. His Eole, 
as General Mensier testifies, prolonged a jump as 
far as 50 metres as early as 1890. In 1897 his 
Avion fairly flew. (This is a year ahead of the 
date of my earliest photograph of S. P. Langley's 
aeropile in mid-air.) This, however, is beside our 
present mark. The fact of interest here is that in 
1908, when flying was still almost incredible, M. 
Ader published his Aviation Militaire. Well, 
that was seven years ago, and men have been fight- 
ing in the air now for a year, and there is still noth- 
ing being done that M. Ader did not see, and which 
we, if we had had the wisdom to attend to him, 
might not have been prepared for. There is much 
that he foretells which is still awaiting its inevit- 
able fulfilment. So clearly can men of adequate 
knowledge and sound reasoning power see into the 
years ahead in all such matters of material develop- 
ment. 

But it is not with the development of mechanical 
inventions that the writer now proposes to treat. 
In these papers he intends to hazard certain fore- 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 7 

casts about the trend of events in the next decade 
or so. Mechanical novelties will probably play a 
very small part in that coming history. This 
worldwide war means a general arrest of invention 
and enterprise, except in the direction of the war 
business. Ability is concentrated upon that; the 
types of ability that are not applicable to warfare 
are neglected ; there is a vast destruction of capital 
and a waste of the savings that are needed to finance 
new experiments. Moreover, we are killing off 
many of our brightest young men. It is fairly safe 
to assume that there will be very little new furni- 
ture on the stage of the world for some considerable 
time; that if there is much difference in the roads 
and railways and shipping it will be for the worse ; 
that architecture, domestic equipment, and so on, 
will be fortunate if in 1924 they stand where they 
did in the spring of 1914. In the trenches of France 
and Flanders, and on the battlefields of Russia, the 
Germans have been spending and making the world 
spend the comfort, the luxury and the progress of 
the next quarter-century. There is no accounting 
for tastes. But the result is that, while it was pos- 
sible for the writer in 1900 to write Anticipations 
of the Reaction of Mechanical Progress upon Hu- 



8 WHAT IS COMING? 

man Life and Thought, in 1916 his anticipations 
must belong to quite another system of conse- 
quences. 

The broad material facts before us are plain 
enough. It is the mental facts that have to be un- 
ravelled. It isn't now a question of " What thing 
— what faculty — what added power will come to 
hand, and how will it affect our ways of living? " 
It is a question of " How are people going to take 
these obvious things — waste of the world's re- 
sources, arrest of material progress, the killing of a 
large moiety of the males in nearly every European 
country, and universal loss and unhappiness? " 
We are going to deal with realities here, at once 
more intimate and less accessible than the effects of 
mechanism. 

As a preliminary reconnaissance, as it were, over 
the region of problems we have to attack, let us con- 
sider the difficulties of a single question, which is 
also a vital and central question in this forecast. 
We shall not attempt a full answer here, because 
too many of the factors must remain unexamined ; 
later, perhaps, we may be in a better position to do 
so. This question is the probability of the estab- 
lishment of a long world peace. At the outset of 
the war there was a very widely felt hope among 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 9 

the intellectuals of the world that this war might 
clear up most of the outstanding international prob- 
lems, and prove the last war. The writer, looking 
across the gulf of experience that separates us from 
1914, recalls two pamphlets whose very titles are 
eloquent of this feeling — The War that will End 
War, and The Peace of the World. Was the 
hope expressed in those phrases a dream? Is it al- 
ready proven a dream? Or can we read between 
the lines of the war news, diplomatic disputations, 
threats and accusations, political wranglings and 
stories of hardship and cruelty that now fill our 
papers, anything that still justifies a hope that these 
bitter years of world sorrow are the darkness before 
the dawn of a better day for mankind? Let us 
handle this problem for a preliminary examination. 
What is really being examined here is the power 
of human reason to prevail over passion — and cer- 
tain other restraining and qualifying forces. There 
can be little doubt that, if one could canvass all 
mankind and ask them whether they would rather 
have no war any more, the overwhelming mass of 
them would elect for universal peace. If it were 
war of the modern mechanical type that was in 
question, with air raids, high explosives, poison gas 
and submarines, there could be no doubt at all about 



10 WHAT IS COMING? 

the response. " Give peace in our time, O Lord," is 
more than ever the common prayer of Christendom, 
and the very war makers claim to be peace makers ; 
the German Emperor has never faltered in his as- 
sertion that he encouraged Austria to send an im- 
possible ultimatum to Serbia, and invaded Belgium 
because Germany was being attacked. The Krupp- 
Kaiser Empire, he assures us, is no eagle, but a 
double-headed lamb, resisting the shearers and 
butchers. The apologists for war are in a hopeless 
minority; a certain number of German Prussians 
who think war good for the soul, and the dear ladies 
of the London Morning Post who think war so good 
for the manners of the working classes, are rare, 
discordant voices in the general chorus against war. 
If a mere unsupported and unco-ordinated will for 
peace could realise itself, there would be peace, and 
an enduring peace, to-morrow. But, as a matter 
of fact, there is no peace coming to-morrow, and no 
clear prospect yet of an enduring universal peace at 
the end of this war. 

Now what are the obstructions, and what are the 
antagonisms to the exploitation of this worldwide 
disgust with war and the worldwide desire for peace, 
so as to establish a world peace? Let us take them 
in order, and it will speedily become apparent that 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 11 

we are dealing here with a subtle quantitative prob- 
lem in psychology, a constant weighing of whether 
this force or that force is the stronger. We are 
dealing with influences so subtle that the accidents 
of some striking dramatic occurrence, for example, 
may turn them this way or that. We are dealing 
with the human will — and thereby comes a snare 
for the feet of the would-be impartial prophet. To 
foretell the future is to modify the future. It is 
hard for any prophet not to break into exhortation 
after the fashion of the prophets of Israel. 

The first difficulty in the way of establishing a 
world peace is that it is nobody's business in par- 
ticular. Nearly all of us want a world peace — in 
an amateurish sort of way. But there is no specific 
person or persons to whom one can look for the 
initiatives. The world is a supersaturated solu- 
tion of the will-for-peace, and there is nothing for it 
to crystallise upon. There is no one in all the world 
who is responsible for the understanding and over- 
coming of the difficulties involved. There are many 
more people, and there is much more intelligence 
concentrated upon the manufacture of cigarettes or 
hairpins than there is upon the establishment of a 
permanent world peace. There are a few special 
secretaries employed by philanthropic Americans, 



12 WHAT IS COMING? 

and that is about all. There has been no provision 
made even for the emoluments of these gentlemen 
when universal peace is attained ; presumably they 
would lose their jobs. Nearly everybody wants 
peace; nearly everybody would be glad to wave a 
white flag with a dove on it now — provided no un- 
fair use was made of such a demonstration by the 
enemy — but there is practically nobody thinking 
out the arrangements needed, and nobody making 
nearly as much propaganda for the instruction of 
the world in the things needful as is made in selling 
any popular make of automobile. We have all our 
particular businesses to attend to. And things are 
not got by just wanting them ; things are got by 
getting them, and rejecting whatever precludes our 
getting them. 

That is the first great difficulty: the formal 
Peace Movement is quite amateurish. It is so ama- 
teurish that the bulk of people do not even realise 
the very first implication of the peace of the world. 
It has not succeeded in bringing this home to them. 
If there is to be a permanent peace of the world, it 
is clear that there must be some permanent means 
of settling disputes between Powers and nations 
that would otherwise be at war. That means that 
there must be some head power, some point of refer- 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 13 

ence, a supreme court of some kind, a universally 
recognised executive over and above the separate 
Governments of the world that exist to-day. That 
does not mean that those Governments have to dis- 
appear, that " nationality " has to be given up, or 
anything so drastic as that. But it does mean that 
all those Governments have to surrender almost as 
much of their sovereignty as the constituent sover- 
eign States which make up the United States of 
America have surrendered to the Federal Govern- 
ment; if their unification is to be anything more 
than a formality, they will have to delegate a con- 
trol of their inter-State relations to an extent for 
which few minds are prepared at present. It is 
really quite idle to dream of a warless world in 
which States are still absolutely free to annoy one 
another with tariffs, with the blocking and squeez- 
ing of trade routes, with the ill-treatment of immi- 
grants and travelling strangers, and between which 
there is no means of settling boundary disputes. 
Moreover, as between the united States of the world 
and the United States of America there is this 
further complication of the world position : that al- 
most all the great States of Europe are in posses- 
sion, firstly, of highly developed territories of alien 
language and race, such as Egypt ; and, secondly, of 



14 WHAT IS COMING? 

barbaric and less-developed territories, such as 
Nigeria or Madagascar. There will be nothing 
stable about a world settlement that does not de- 
stroy in these " possessions " the national prefer- 
ence of the countries that " own " them and that 
does not prepare for the immediate or eventual ac- 
cession of these subject peoples to State rank. But 
thousands of intelligent people in those great Euro- 
pean countries who believe themselves ardent for a 
world peace will be staggered at any proposal to 
place any part of " our Empire " under a world 
administration on the footing of a United States 
territory. Until they cease to be staggered by any- 
thing of the sort, their aspirations for a permanent 
peace will remain disconnected from the main cur- 
rent of their lives. And that current will flow, 
sluggishly or rapidly, towards war. For essentially 
these " possessions " are like tariffs, like the strate- 
gic occupation of neutral countries or secret treat- 
ies ; they are forms of the conflict between nations 
to oust and prevail over other nations. Going on 
with such things and yet deprecating war is really 
not an attempt to abolish conflict ; it is an attempt 
to retain conflict and limit its intensity; it is like 
trying to play hockey on the understanding that the 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 15 

ball shall never travel faster than eight miles an 
hour. 

Now it not only stands in our way to a permanent 
peace of the world that the great mass of men are 
not prepared for even the most obvious implications 
of such an idea, but there is also a second invincible 
difficulty — that there is nowhere in the world any- 
body, any type of men, any organisation, any idea, 
any nucleus or germ that could possibly develop 
into the necessary over-Government. We are ask- 
ing for something out of the air, out of nothingness, 
that will necessarily array against itself the resist- 
ance of all those who are in control, or interested 
in the control, of the affairs of sovereign States of 
the world as they are at present ; the resistance of 
a gigantic network of Government organisations, 
interests, privileges, assumptions. Against this a 
headless, vague aspiration, however universal, is 
likely to prove quite ineffective. Of course, it is 
possible to suggest that the Hague Tribunal is con- 
ceivably the germ of such an overriding direction 
and supreme court as the peace of the world de- 
mands, but in reality the Hague Tribunal is a mere 
legal automatic machine. It does nothing unless 
you set it in motion. It has no initiative. It does 



16 WHAT IS COMING? 

not even protest against the most obvious outrages 
upon that phantom of a world-conscience — inter- 
national law. 

Pacificists in their search for some definite start- 
ing-point, about which the immense predisposition 
for peace may crystallise, have suggested the Pope 
and various religious organisations as a possible 
basis for the organisation of peace. But there 
would be no appeal from such a beginning to the 
non-Christian majority of mankind, and the sug- 
gestion in itself indicates a profound ignorance of 
the nature of the Christian churches. With the 
exception of the Quakers and a few Russian sects, 
no Christian sect or church has ever repudiated 
war; most have gone out of the way to sanction it 
and bless it. It is altogether too rashly assumed 
by people whose sentimentality outruns their knowl- 
edge that Christianity is essentially an attempt to 
carry out the personal teachings of Christ. It is 
nothing of the sort, and no church authority will 
support that idea. Christianity — more particu- 
larly after the ascendency of the Trinitarian doc- 
trine was established — was and is a theological 
religion; it is the religion that triumphed over 
Arianism, Manichseisni, Gnosticism, and the like; 
it is based not on Christ, but on its creeds ; Christ, 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 17 

indeed, is not even its symbol ; on the contrary, the 
chosen symbol of Christianity is the cross to which 
Christ was nailed and on which He died. It was 
very largely a religion of the legions. It was the 
warrior Theodosius who, more than any single other 
man, imposed it upon Europe. There is no reason, 
therefore, either in precedent or profession, for ex- 
pecting any plain lead from the churches in this 
tremendous task of organising and making effective 
the widespread desire of the world for peace. And 
even were this the case, it is doubtful if we should 
find in the divines and dignitaries of the Vatican, 
of the Russian and British official churches, or of 
any other of the multitudinous Christian sects, the 
power and energy, the knowledge and ability, or 
even the goodwill needed to negotiate so vast a thing 
as the creation of a world authority. 

One other possible starting-point has been sug- 
gested. It is no great feat for a naive imagination 
to suppose the President of the Swiss Confederation 
or the President of the United States — for each of 
these two systems is an exemplary and encourag- 
ing instance of the possibility of the pacific syn- 
thesis of independent States — taking a propa- 
gandist course and proposing extensions of their 
own systems to the suffering belligerents. But 



18 WHAT IS COMING? 

nothing of the sort occurs. And when you come to 
look into the circumstances of these two Presidents 
you will discover that neither of them is any more 
free than anybody else to embark upon the task of 
creating a State-overriding, war-preventing organ- 
isation of the world. He has been created by a sys- 
tem, and he is bound to a system; his concern is 
with the interests of the people of Switzerland or of 
the United States of America. President Wilson, 
for example, is quite sufficiently occupied by the 
affairs of the White House, by the clash of political 
parties, by interferences with American overseas 
trade and the security of American citizens. He 
has no more time to give to projects for the funda- 
mental reconstruction of international relationships 
than has any recruit drilling in England, or any 
captain on an ocean liner, or any engineer in charge 
of a going engine. 

We are all, indeed, busy with the things that come 
to hand every day. We are all anxious for a per- 
manent world peace, but we are all up to the neck 
in things that leave us no time to attend to this 
world peace that nearly every sane man desires. 
Meanwhile, a small minority of people who trade 
upon contention — militarists, ambitious kings and 
statesmen, war contractors, loan mongers, sensa- 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 19 

tional journalists — follow up their interests and 
start and sustain war. There lies the paradox- 
ical reality of this question. Our first inquiry lands 
us into the elucidation of this deadlock. Nearly 
everybody desires a world peace, and yet there is 
not apparent anywhere any men free and able and 
willing to establish it, while, on the other hand, 
there are a considerable number of men in positions 
of especial influence and power who will certainly 
resist the arrangements that are essential to its 
establishment. 

But does this exhaust the question, and must we 
conclude that mankind is doomed to a perpetual, 
futile struggling of States and nations and peoples 
— breaking ever and again into war? The answer 
to that would probably be " Yes " if it were not for 
the progress of war. War is continually becoming 
more scientific, more destructive, more coldly logi- 
cal, more intolerant of non-combatants, and more 
exhausting of every kind of property. There is 
every reason to believe that it will continue to in- 
tensify these characteristics. By doing so it may 
presently bring about a state of affairs that will 
supply just the lacking elements that are needed 
for the development of a world peace. I would 
venture to suggest that the present war is doing so 



20 WHAT IS COMING? 

now : that it is producing changes in men's minds 
that may presently give us both the needed energy 
and the needed organisation from which a world 
direction may develop. 

The first, most distinctive thing about this con- 
flict is the exceptionally searching way in which it 
attacks human happiness. No war has ever de- 
stroyed happiness so widely. It has not only killed 
and wounded an unprecedented proportion of the 
male population of all the combatant nations, but 
it has also destroyed wealth beyond precedent. It 
has also destroyed freedom — of movement, of 
speech, of economic enterprise. Hardly any one 
alive has escaped the worry of it and the threat of 
it. It has left scarcely a life untouched, and made 
scarcely a life happier. There is a limit to the prin- 
ciple that " everybody's business is nobody's busi- 
ness." The establishment of a world State, which 
was interesting only to a few cranks and visionaries 
before the war, is now the lively interest of a very 
great number of people. They inquire about it; 
they have become accessible to ideas about it. 

Peace organisation seems, indeed, to be following 
the lines of public sanitation. Everybody in Eng- 
land, for example, was bored by the discussion 
of sanitation — until the great cholera epidemic. 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 21 

Everybody thought public health a very desirable 
thing, but nobody thought it intensely and overrid- 
ingly desirable. Then the interest in sanitation 
grew lively, and people exerted themselves to cre- 
ate responsible organisations. Crimes of violence, 
again, were neglected in the great cities of Europe 
until the danger grew to dimensions that evolved 
the police. There come occasions when the normal 
concentration of an individual upon his own im- 
mediate concerns becomes impossible; as, for in- 
stance, when a man who is stocktaking in his busi- 
ness premises discovers that the house next door is 
on fire. A great many people who have never 
troubled their heads about anything but their own 
purely personal and selfish interests are now realis- 
ing that quite a multitude of houses about them are 
ablaze, and that the fire is spreading. 

That is one change the war will bring about that 
will make for world peace : a quickened general in- 
terest in its possibility. Another is the certainty 
that the war will increase the number of devoted 
and fanatic characters available for disinterested 
effort. Whatever other outcome this war may have, 
it means that there lies ahead a period of extreme 
economic and political dislocation. The credit sys- 
tem has been strained, and will be strained, and 



22 WHAT IS COMING? 

will need unprecedented readjustments. In the 
past such phases of uncertainty, sudden impoverish- 
ment and disorder as certainly lie ahead of us have 
meant for a considerable number of minds a release 
— or, if you prefer it, a flight — from the habitual 
and selfish. Types of intense religiosity, of devo- 
tion and of endeavour are let loose, and there will 
be much more likelihood that we may presently find, 
what it is impossible to find now, a number of de- 
voted men and women ready to give their whole 
lives, with a quasi-religious enthusiasm, to this 
great task of peace establishment, finding in such 
impersonal work a refuge from the disappoint- 
ments, limitations, losses and sorrows of their per- 
sonal life — a refuge we need but little in more set- 
tled and more prosperous periods. They will be 
but the outstanding individuals in a very universal 
quickening. And simultaneously with this quick- 
ening of the general imagination by experience 
there are certain other developments in progress 
that point very clearly to a change under the pres- 
sure of this war of just those institutions of nation- 
ality, kingship, diplomacy and inter-State competi- 
tion that have hitherto stood most effectually in the 
way of a world pacification. The considerations 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 23 

that seem to point to this third change are very con- 
vincing, to my mind. 

The real operating cause that is, I believe, going 
to break down the deadlock that has hitherto made 
a supreme court and a federal government for the 
world at large a dream, lies in just that possibility 
of an " inconclusive peace " which so many people 
seem to dread. Germany, I believe, is going to be 
beaten, but not completely crushed, by this war; 
she is going to be left militarist and united with 
Austria and Hungary, and unchanged in her essen- 
tial nature ; and out of that state of affairs comes, I 
believe, the hope for an ultimate confederation of 
the nations of the earth. 

Because, in the face of a league of the Central 
European Powers attempting recuperation, cherish- 
ing revenge, dreaming of a renewal of the struggle, 
it becomes impossible for the British, the French, 
the Belgians, Russians, Italians or Japanese to 
think any longer of settling their differences by war 
among themselves. To do so will mean the creation 
of opportunity for the complete reinstatement of 
German militarism. It will open the door for 
a conclusive German hegemony. Now, however 
clumsy and confused the diplomacy of these present 



24 WHAT IS COMING? 

Allies may be (challenged constantly, as it is, by 
democracy and hampered by a free, venal and irre- 
sponsible Press in at least three of their countries), 
the necessity they will be under will be so urgent 
and so evident that it is impossible to imagine that 
they will not set up some permanent organ for the 
direction and co-ordination of their joint interna- 
tional relationships. It may be a queerly consti- 
tuted body at first ; it may be of a merely diplomatic 
pretension ; it may be called a Congress, or any old 
name of that sort, but essentially its business will 
be to conduct a joint, fiscal, military and naval 
policy, to keep the peace in the Balkans and Asia, 
to establish a relationship with China, and organise 
joint and several arbitration arrangements with 
America. And it must develop something more 
sure and swift than our present diplomacy. One 
of its chief concerns will be the right of way through 
the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and the watch- 
ing of the forces that stir up conflict in the Balkans 
and the Levant. It must have unity enough for 
that; it must be much more than a mere leisurely, 
unauthoritative conference of representatives. 

For precisely similar reasons it seems to me in- 
credible that the two great Central European 
Powers should ever fall into sustained conflict again 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 25 

with one another. They, too, will be forced to 
create some overriding body to prevent so suicidal 
a possibility. America too, it may be, will develop 
some Pan-American equivalent. Probably the hun- 
dred millions of Latin America may achieve a 
method of unity, and then deal on equal terms with 
the present United States. The thing has been ably 
advocated already in South America. Whatever 
appearances of separate sovereignties are kept up 
after the war, the practical outcome of the struggle 
is quite likely to be this: that there will be only 
three great World Powers left — the anti-German 
allies, the allied Central Europeans, the Pan- 
Americans. And it is to be noted that, whatever 
the constituents of these three Powers may be, none 
of them is likely to be a monarchy. They may in- 
clude monarchies, as England includes dukedoms. 
But they will be overriding alliances, not overriding 
rulers. I leave it to the mathematician to work 
out exactly how much the chances of conflict are 
diminished when there are practically only three 
Powers in the world instead of some scores. And 
these new Powers will be in certain respects unlike 
any existing European " States." None of the three 
Powers will be small or homogeneous enough to 
serve dynastic ambitions, embody a national or 



26 WHAT IS COMING? 

racial Kultur, or fall into the grip of any group of 
financial enterprises. They will be more compre- 
hensive, less romantic, and more businesslike alto- 
gether. They will be, to use a phrase suggested a 
year or so ago, Great States. ... And the war 
threat between the three will be so plain and defin- 
ite, the issues will be so lifted out of the spheres of 
merely personal ambition and national feeling, that 
I do not see why the negotiating means, the stand- 
ing conference of the three, should not ultimately 
become the needed nucleus of the World State for 
which at present we search the world in vain. 

There are more ways than one to the World State, 
and this second possibility of a post-war conference 
and a conference of the Allies, growing almost una- 
wares into a pacific organisation of the world, since 
it goes on directly from existing institutions, since 
it has none of the quality of a clean break with the 
past which the idea of an immediate World State 
and Pax Mundi involves, and more particularly 
since it neither abolishes nor has in it anything to 
shock fundamentally the princes, the diplomatists, 
the lawyers, the statesmen and politicians, the na- 
tionalists and suspicious people, since it gives them 
years in which to change and die out and reappear 
in new forms, and since at the same time it will 



FORECASTING THE FUTURE 27 

command the support of every intelligent human 
being who gets his mind clear enough from his cir- 
cumstances to understand its import, is a far more 
credible hope than the hope of anything coming de 
novo out of Hague Foundations or the manifest 
logic of the war. 

But, of course, there weighs against these hopes 
the possibility that the Allied Powers are too vari- 
ous in their nature, too biased, too feeble intellect- 
ually and imaginatively, to hold together and main- 
tain any institution for co-operation. The British 
Press may be too silly not to foster irritation and 
suspicion ; we may get Carsonism on a larger scale 
trading on the resuscitation of dying hatreds; the 
British and Russian diplomatists may play annoy- 
ing tricks upon one another by sheer force of habit. 
There may be many troubles of that sort. Even 
then I do not see that the hope of an ultimate world 
peace vanishes. But it will be a Roman world 
peace, made in Germany, and there will have to be 
several more great wars before it is established. 
Germany is too homogeneous yet to have begun the 
lesson of compromise and the renunciation of the 
dream of national conquest. The Germans are a 
national not an imperial people. France has learnt 
that through suffering, and Britain and Russia be- 



28 WHAT IS COMING? 

cause for two centuries they have been imperial and 
not national systems. The German conception of 
world peace is as yet a conception of German ascend- 
ency. The Allied conception becomes perforce one 
of mutual toleration. 

But I will not press this inquiry farther now. 

It is, as I said at the beginning, a preliminary ex- 
ploration of one of the great questions w T ith which 
I propose to play in these articles. The possibility 
I have sketched is the one that most commends it- 
self to me as probable. After a more detailed ex- 
amination of the big operating forces at present 
working in the world, we may be in a position to 
revise these suggestions with a greater confidence 
and draw our net of probabilities a little tighter. 



II 

THE END OF THE WAR* 

The prophet who emerges with the most honour 
from this war is Bloch. It must be fifteen or six- 
teen years ago since this gifted Pole made his fore- 
cast of the future. Perhaps it is more, for the 
French translation of his book was certainly in 
existence before the Boer War. His case was that 
war between antagonists of fairly equal equipment 
must end in a deadlock because of the continually 
increasing defensive efficiency of entrenched infan- 
try. This would give the defensive an advantage 
over the most brilliant strategy and over consider- 
ably superior numbers that would completely dis- 
courage all aggression. He concluded that war was 
played out. 

His book was very carefully studied in Germany. 
As a humble disciple of Bloch I should have realised 

* This chapter was originally a newspaper article. It was 
written in December, 1915, and published about the middle of 
January. Some of it has passed from the quality of anticipa- 
tion to achievement, but I do not see that it needs any material 
revision on that account. 

29 



30 WHAT IS COMING? 

this, but I did not, and that failure led me into some 
unfortunate prophesying at the outbreak of the war. 
I judged Germany by the Kaiser, and by the Kaiser- 
worship which I saw in Berlin. I thought that he 
was a theatrical person who would dream of vast 
massed attacks and tremendous cavalry charges, 
and that he would lead Germany to be smashed 
against the Allied defensive in the West, and to be 
smashed so thoroughly that the war would be over. 
I did not properly appreciate the more studious and 
more thorough Germany that was to fight behind the 
Kaiser and thrust him aside, the Germany we Brit- 
ish fight now, the Ostwald-Krupp Germany of 1915. 
That Germany, one may now perceive, had read and 
thought over and thought out the Bloch problem. 
There was also a translation of Bloch into French. 
In English a portion of his book was translated for 
the general reader and published with a preface by 
the late Mr. W. T. Stead. It does not seem to have 
reached the British military authorities, nor was it 
published in England with an instructive intention. 
As an imaginative work it would have been con- 
sidered worthless and impracticable. 

But it is manifest now that if the Belgian and 
French frontiers had been properly prepared — as 
they should have been prepared when the Germans 



THE END OF THE WAR 31 

built their strategic railways — with trenches and 
gun emplacements and secondary and tertiary lines, 
the Germans would never have got fifty miles into 
either France or Belgium. They would have been 
held at Liege and in the Ardennes. Five hundred 
thousand men would have held them indefinitely. 
But the Allies had never worked out trench war- 
fare; they were unready for it, the Germans knew 
of their unreadiness, and upon their unreadiness it 
is quite clear they calculated. They did not reckon, 
it is now clear that they were right in not reckoning, 
the Allies as contemporary soldiers. They were go- 
ing to fight a 1900 army with a 1914 army, and their 
whole opening scheme was based on the conviction 
that the Allies would not entrench. Somebody in 
those marvellous maxims from the dark ages that 
seem to form the chief reading of our military ex- 
perts, said that the army that entrenches is a de- 
feated army. The silly dictum was repeated and re- 
peated in the English papers after the battle of the 
Marne. It shows just where our military science 
had reached in 1914, namely, to a level a year before 
Bloch wrote. So the Allies retreated. For long 
weeks the Allies retreated out of the west of Bel- 
gium, out of the north of France, and for rather over 
a month there was a loose mobile war — as if Bloch 



32 WHAT IS COMING? 

had never existed. The Germans were not fighting 
the 1914 pattern of war, they were fighting the 1899 
pattern of war, in which direct attack, outflanking 
and so on were still supposed to be possible; they 
were fighting confident in their overwhelming num- 
bers, in their prepared surprise, in the unthought- 
out methods of their opponents. In the " Victor- 
ian " war that ended in the middle of September, 
1914, they delivered their blow, they overreached, 
they were successfully counter-attacked on the 
Marne, and then abruptly — almost unfairly it 
seemed to the British sportsmanlike conceptions — 
they shifted to the game played according to the 
very latest rules of 1914. The war did not come up 
to date until the battle of the Aisne. With that 
the second act of the great drama began. 

I do not believe that the Germans ever thought it 
would come up to date so soon. I believe they 
thought that they would hustle the French out of 
Paris, come right up to the Channel at Calais before 
the end of 1914, and then entrench, produce the sub- 
marine attack and the Zeppelins against England, 
working from Calais as a base, and that they would 
end the war before the spring of 1915 — with the 
Allies still a good fifteen years behindhand. I be- 
lieve the battle of the Marne was the decisive battle 



THE END OF THE WAR 33 

of the war, in that it shattered this plan, and that 
the rest of the 1914 fighting was Germany's attempt 
to reconstruct their broken scheme in the face of an 
enemy who was continually getting more and more 
nearly up to date with the fighting. By December, 
Bloch, who had seemed utterly discredited in 
August, was justified up to the hilt. The world 
was entrenched at his feet. By May the lagging 
military science of the British had so far overtaken 
events as to realise that shrapnel was no longer so 
important as high explosive, and within a year the 
significance of machine guns, a significance thor- 
oughly ventilated by imaginative writers fifteen 
years before, was being grasped by the conservative 
but by no means inadaptable leaders of Britain. 

The war since that first attempt — admirably 
planned and altogether justifiable (from a military 
point of view, I mean) — of Germany to " rush " a 
victory, has consisted almost entirely of failures on 
both sides either to get round or through or over the 
situation foretold by Bloch. There has been only 
one marked success, the German success in Poland 
due to the failure of the Russian munitions. Then 
for a time the war in the East was mobile and pre- 
carious while the Russians retreated to their present 
positions, and the Germans pursued and tried to 



31 WHAT IS COMING? 

surround them. That was a lapse into the pre- 
Bloch style. Now the Kussians are again en- 
trenched, their supplies are restored, the Germans 
have a lengthened line of supplies, and Bloch is 
back upon his pedestal so far as the eastern theatre 
goes. Bloch has been equally justified in the Anglo- 
French attempt to get round through Gallipoli. 
The forces of the India Office have pushed their way 
through unprepared country towards Bagdad, and 
are now entrenching in Mesopotamia, but from the 
point of view of the main war that is too remote to 
be considered either getting through or getting 
round ; and so too the losses of the German colonies 
and the East African War are scarcely to be 
reckoned with in the main war. They have no de- 
termining value. There remains the Balkan strug- 
gle. But the Balkan struggle is something else; 
it is something new. It must be treated separately. 
It is a war of treacheries and brags and appear- 
ances. It is not a part of, it is a sequence to, the 
deadlock war of 1915. 

But before dealing with this new development of 
the latter half of 1915 it is necessary to consider 
certain general aspects of the deadlock war. It is 
manifest that the Germans hoped to secure an ef- 
fective victory in this war before they ran up against 



THE END OF THE WAR 35 

Bloch. But reckoning with Bloch, as they certainly 
did, they hoped that even in the event of the war get- 
ting to earth it would still be possible to produce 
novelties that would sufficiently neutralise Bloch 
to secure a victorious peace. With unexpectedly 
powerful artillery suddenly concentrated, with high 
explosives, with asphyxiating gas, with a well-or- 
ganised system of grenade throwing and mining, 
with attacks of flaming gas, and above all with a 
vast munition-making plant to keep them going, 
they had a very reasonable chance of hacking their 
way through. Against these prepared novelties the 
Allies have had to improvise, and on the whole the 
improvisation has kept pace with the demands made 
upon it. They have brought their military science 
up-to-date, and to-day the disparity in science and 
equipment between the antagonists has greatly di- 
minished. There has been no escaping Bloch after 
all, and the deadlock, if no sudden peace occurs, can 
end now in only one thing, the exhaustion in various 
degrees of all the combatants and the succumbing 
of the most exhausted. The idea of a conclusive 
end of the traditional pattern to this war, of a 
triumphal entry into London, Paris, Berlin or Mos- 
cow, is to be dismissed altogether from our calcula- 
tions. The end of this war will be a matter of nego- 



36 WHAT IS COMING? 

tiation between practically immobilised and ex- 
tremely shattered antagonists. 

There is, of course, one aspect of the Bloch dead- 
lock that the Germans at least have contemplated. 
If it is not possible to get through or round, it may 
still be possible to get over. There is the air path. 
This idea has certainly taken hold of the French 
mind, but France has been too busy and is tempera- 
mentally too economical to risk large expenditures 
upon what is necessarily an experiment. The 
British are too conservative and sceptical to be the 
pioneers in any such enterprise. The Russians 
have been too poor in the necessary resources of 
mechanics and material. The Germans alone have 
made any sustained attempt to strike through the 
air at their enemies beyond the war zone. Their 
Zeppelin raids upon England have shown a steadily 
increasing efficiency, and it is highly probable that 
they will be repeated on a much larger scale before 
the war is over. Quite possibly, too, the Germans 
are developing an accessory force of large aero- 
planes to co-operate in such an attack. The long 
coasts of Britain, the impossibility of their being 
fully equipped throughout their extent, except at a 
prohibitive cost of men and material, to resist air 
invaders, exposes the whole length of the island to 



THE END OF THE WAR 37 

considerable risk and annoyance from such an expe- 
dition. It is doubtful, though, if the utmost dam- 
age an air raid is likely to inflict upon England 
would count materially in the exhaustion process, 
and the moral effect of these raids has been, and will 
be, to stiffen the British resolution to fight this war 
through to the conclusive ending of any such possi- 
bilities. The net result of these air raids is an in- 
flexible determination of the British people rather 
to die in death grips with German militarism than 
to live and let it survive. The best chance for the 
aircraft was at the beginning of the war, when a 
surprise development might have had astounding re- 
sults. That chance has gone by. The Germans are 
racially inferior to both French and English in the 
air, and the probability of effective blows over the 
deadlock is on the whole a probability in favour 
of the Allies. Nor is there anything on or under the 
sea that seems likely now to produce decisive re- 
sults. We return from these considerations to a 
strengthened acceptance of Bloch. 

The essential question for the prophet remains 
therefore the question of which group of powers will 
exhaust itself most rapidly. And following on 
from that comes the question of how the successive 
stages of exhaustion will manifest themselves in the 



38 WHAT IS COMING? 

combatant nations. The problems of this war, as 
of all war, end as they begin in national psychology. 

But it will be urged that this is reckoning without 
the Balkans. I submit that the German thrust 
through the wooded wilderness of Serbia is really 
no part of the war that has ended in the deadlock of 
1915. It is dramatic, tragic, spectacular, but it is 
quite inconclusive. Here there is no way round or 
through to any vital centre of Germany's antago- 
nists. It turns nothing ; it opens no path to Paris, 
London, or Petrograd. It is a long, long way from 
the Danube to either Egypt or Mesopotamia, and 
there and there — Bloch is waiting. I do not think 
the Germans have any intention of so generous an 
extension of their responsibilities. The Balkan 
complication is no solution of the deadlock problem. 
It is the opening of the sequel. 

A whole series of new problems are opened up 
directly we turn to this most troubled region of the 
Balkans — problems of the value of kingship, of 
nationality, of the destiny of such cities as Constan- 
tinople, which from their very beginning have never 
had any sort of nationality at all, of the destiny of 
countries such as Albania, where a tangle of intense 
tribal nationalities is distributed in spots and 
patches, or Dalmatia, where one extremely self -con- 



THE END OF THE WAR 39 

scious nation and language is present in the towns 
and another in the surrounding country, or Asia 
Minor, where no definite national boundaries, no 
religious, linguistic, or social homogeneities have 
ever established themselves since the Roman legions 
beat them down. But all these questions can really 
be deferred or set aside in our present discussion, 
which is a discussion of the main war. Whatever 
surprises or changes this last phase of the Eastern 
Empire, that blood-clotted melodrama, may involve, 
they will but assist and hasten on the essential con- 
clusion of the great war, that the Central Powers 
and their pledged antagonists are in a deadlock, un- 
able to reach a decision, and steadily, day by day, 
hour by hour, losing men, destroying material, spend- 
ing credit, approaching something unprecedented, 
unknown, that we try to express to ourselves by 
the word exhaustion. Just how the people who use 
the word " exhaustion " so freely are prepared to de- 
fine it, is a matter for speculation. The idea seems 
to be a phase in which the production of equipped 
forces ceases through the using up of men or ma- 
terial or both. If the exhaustion is fairly mutual, 
it need not be decisive for a long time. It may 
mean simply an ebb of vigour on both sides, un- 
usual hardship, a general social and economic dis- 



% 40 WHAT IS COMING? 

organisation and grading down. The fact that a 
great killing off of men is implicit in the process, 
and that the survivors will be largely under dis- 
cipline, militates against the idea that the end may 
come suddenly through a vigorous revolutionary 
outbreak. Exhaustion is likely to be a very long 
and very thorough process, extending over years. 
A " war of attrition " may last into 1918 or 1919, 
and may bring us to conditions of strain and de- 
privation still only very vaguely imagined. What 
happens in the Turkish Empire or India or America 
or elsewhere may extend the areas of waste and ac- 
celerate or retard the process, but is quite unlikely 
to end it. 

Let us ask now which of the combatants is likely 
to undergo exhaustion most rapidly, and what is 
of equal or greater importance, which is likely to 
feel it first and most? No doubt there is a bias in 
my mind, but it seems to me that the odds are on the 
whole heavily against the Central Powers. Their 
peculiar German virtue, their tremendously com- 
plete organisation, which enabled them to put so 
large a proportion of their total resources into their 
first onslaught and to make so great and rapid a re- 
covery in the spring of 1915, leaves them with less 
to draw upon now. Out of a smaller fortune they 



THE END OF THE WAR 41 

have spent a larger sum. They are blockaded to a 
very considerable extent, and against them fight not 
merely the resources of the Allies, but, thanks to the 
complete British victory in the sea struggle, the 
purchasable resources of all the world. Conceiv- 
ably the Central Powers will draw upon the re- 
sources of their Balkan and Asiatic allies, but the 
extent to which they can do that may very easily be 
over-estimated. There is a limit to the power for 
treason of these supposititious German monarchs 
that Western folly has permitted to possess these 
Balkan thrones — thrones which need never have 
been thrones at all — and none of the Balkan peo- 
ples is likely to witness with enthusiasm the com- 
plete looting of its country in the German interest 
by a German court. Germany will have to pay on 
the nail for most of her Balkan help. She will have 
to put more into the Balkans than she takes out. 
Compared with the world behind the Allies the 
Turkish Empire is a country of mountains, desert 
and undeveloped lands. To develop these regions 
into a source of supplies under the strains and 
shortages of wartime, will be an immense and dan- 
gerous undertaking for Germany. She may open 
mines she may never work, build railways that 
others will enjoy, sow harvests for alien reaping. 



42 WHAT IS COMING? 

The people the Bulgarians want in Bulgaria are not 
Germans but Bulgarians ; the people the Turks want 
in Anatolia are not Germans but Turks. And for 
all these tasks Germany must send men. Men? 

At present, so far as any judgment is possible, 
Germany is feeling the pinch of the war much more 
even than France, which is habitually parsimonious, 
and instinctively cleverly economical, and Russia, 
which is hardy and insensitive. Great Britain has 
really only begun to feel the stress. She has prob- 
ably suffered economically no more than have Hol- 
land or Switzerland, and Italy and Japan have cer- 
tainly suffered less. All these three great countries 
are still full of men, of gear, of saleable futures. In 
every part of the globe Great Britain has colossal 
investments. She has still to apply the great prin- 
ciple of conscription not only to her sons but to the 
property of her overseas investors and of her landed 
proprietors. She has not even looked yet at the 
German financial expedients of a year ago. She 
moves reluctantly, but surely, towards such a 
thoroughness of mobilisation. There need be no 
doubt that she will completely socialise herself, 
completely reorganise her whole social and econo- 
mic structure sooner than lose this war. She will 
do it clumsily and ungracefully, with much internal 



THE END OF THE WAR 43 

bickering, with much trickery on the part of her 
lawyers and much baseness on the part of her 
landlords; but she will do it not so slowly as a 
logical mind might anticipate. She will get there 
a little late, expensively, but still in time. . . . 

The German group, I reckon, therefore, will be- 
come exhausted first. I think, too, that Germany 
will, as a nation, feel, and be aware of what is hap- 
pening to her sooner than any other of the nations 
that are sharing in this process of depletion. In 
1914 the Germans were reaping the harvest of forty 
years of economic development and business enter- 
prise. Property and plenty were new experiences, 
and a generation had grown up in whose world a 
sense of expansion and progress was normal. There 
existed amongst it no tradition of the great hard- 
ship of war, such as the French possessed, to steel 
its mind. It had none of the irrational mute tough- 
ness of the Russians and British. It was a senti- 
mental people, making a habit of success ; it rushed 
chanting to war against the most grimly heroic and 
the most stolidly enduring of races. Germany came 
into this war more buoyantly and confidently than 
any other combatant. It expected another 1871; 
at the utmost it anticipated a year of war. Never 
were a people so disillusioned as the Germans must 



44 WHAT IS COMING? 

already be, never has a nation been called upon for 
so complete a mental readjustment. Neither con- 
clusive victories nor defeats have been theirs, but 
only a slow, vast transition from joyful effort and 
an illusion of rapid triumph to hardship, loss and 
loss and loss of substance, the dwindling of great 
hopes, the realisation of ebb in the tide of national 
welfare. Now they must fight on against im- 
placable, indomitable Allies. They are under 
stresses now as harsh at least as the stresses of 
France. And, compared with the French, the Ger- 
mans are untempered steel. We know little of the 
psychology of this new Germany that has come into 
being since 1871, but it is doubtful if it will accept 
defeat, and still more doubtful how it can evade 
some ending to the war that will admit the failure 
of all its great hopes of Paris subjugated, London 
humbled, Russia suppliant, Belgium conquered, the 
Near East a prey. Such an admission will be a day 
of reckoning that German Imperialism will post- 
pone until the last hope of some breach among the 
Allies, some saving miracle in the old Eastern Em- 
pire, some dramatically-snatched victory at the 
eleventh hour, is gone. Nor can the Pledged Allies 
consent to a peace that does not involve the evacua- 
tion and compensation of Belgium and Serbia, and 



THE END OF THE WAR 45 

at least the autonomy of the lost Rhine provinces 
of France. That is their very minimum. That, 
and the making of Germany so sick and weary of 
military adventure that the danger of German ambi- 
tion will cease to overshadow European life. Those 
are the ends of the main war. Europe will go down 
through stage after stage of impoverishment and 
exhaustion until these ends are attained, or made 
forever impossible. 

But these things form only the main outline of a 
story with a vast amount of collateral interest. It 
is to these collateral issues that the amateur in 
prophecy must give his attention. It is here that 
the German will be induced by his government to 
see his compensations. He will be consoled for the 
restoration of Serbia by the prospect of future con- 
flicts between Italian and Jugoslav that will let him 
in again to the Adriatic. His attention will be 
directed to his newer, closer association with Bul- 
garia and Turkey. In those countries he will be 
told he may yet repeat the miracle of Hungary. 
And there may be also another Hungary in Poland. 
It will be whispered to him that he has really con- 
quered those countries when indeed it is highly 
probable he has only spent his substance in setting 
up new assertive alien allies. The Kaiser, if he is 



46 WHAT IS COMING? 

not too afraid of the precedent of Sarajevo, may 
make a great entry into Constantinople, with an 
effect of conquering what is after all only a tempo- 
rarily allied capital. The German will hope also 
to retain his fleet, and no peace, he will be reminded, 
can rob him of his hard-earned technical superiority 
in the air. The German air fleet of 1930 may yet be 
something as predominant as the British Navy of 
1915, and capable of delivering a much more in- 
timate blow. Had he not better wait for that? 
When such consolations as these become popular in 
the German Press we of the Pledged Allies may be- 
gin to talk of peace, for these will be its necessary 
heralds. 

The concluding phase of a process of general ex- 
haustion must almost inevitably be a game of bluff. 
Neither side will admit its extremity. Neither 
side, therefore, will make any direct proposals to 
its antagonists nor any open advances to a neutral. 
But there will be much inspired peace talk through 
neutral media, and the consultations of the anti- 
German allies will become more intimate and de- 
tailed. Suggestions will " leak out " remarkably 
from both sides, to journalists and neutral go-be- 
tweens. The Eastern and Western Allies will prob- 
ably begin quite soon to discuss an anti-German 



THE END OF THE WAR 47 

Zollverein and the co-ordination of their military 
and naval organisations in the days that are to fol- 
low the war. A discussion of a Central European 
Zollverein is already afoot. A general idea of the 
possible rearrangement of the European states after 
the war will grow up in the common European and 
American mind; public men on either side will in- 
dicate concordance with this general idea, and some 
neutral power, Denmark or Spain or the United 
States or Holland, will invite representatives to an 
informal discussion of these possibilities. Prob- 
ably, therefore, the peace negotiations will take the 
extraordinary form of two simultaneous conferences 
— one of the Pledged Allies, sitting probably in 
Paris or London, and the other of representatives 
of all the combatants meeting in some neutral coun- 
try — Holland would be the most convenient — 
while the war will still be going on. The Dutch 
conference would be in immediate contact by tele- 
phone and telegraph with the Allied conference and 
with Berlin. . . . 

The broad conditions of a possible peace will be- 
gin to get stated towards the end of 1916, and a 
certain lassitude will creep over the operations in 
the field. . . . The process of exhaustion will prob- 
ably have reached such a point by that time that it 



48 WHAT IS COMING? 

will be a primary fact in the consciousness of com- 
mon citizens of every belligerent country. The 
common life of all Europe will have become — mis- 
erable. Conclusive blows will have receded out of 
the imagination of the contending Powers. The 
war will have reached its fourth and last stage as a 
war. The war of the great attack will have given 
place to the war of the military deadlock ; the war 
of the deadlock will have gone on, and as the great 
combatants become enfeebled relatively to the 
smaller States, there will have been a gradual shift- 
ing of the interest to the war of treasons and 
diplomacies in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

Quickly thereafter the last phase will be develop- 
ing into predominance, in which each group of na- 
tions will be most concerned, no longer about vic- 
tories or conquest, but about securing for itself the 
best chances of rapid economic recuperation and 
social reconstruction. The commercial treaties, 
the arrangements for future associated action, made 
by the great Allies among themselves will appear 
more and more important to them, and the mere 
question of boundaries less and less. It will dawn 
upon Europe that she has already dissipated the 
resources that have enabled her to levy the tribute 
paid for her investments in every quarter of the 



THE END OF THE WAR 49 

earth, and that neither the Germans nor their an- 
tagonists will be able for many years to go on with 
those projects for world exploitation which lay at 
the root of the great war. Very jaded and anaemic 
nations will sit about the table on which the new 
map of Europe will be drawn. . . . Each of the 
diplomatists will come to that business with a cer- 
tain pre-occupation. Each will be thinking of his 
country as one thinks of a patient of doubtful pa- 
tience and temper who is coming-to out of the 
drugged stupor of a crucial, ill-conceived, and un- 
necessary operation. . . . Each will be thinking of 
Labour, wounded and perplexed, returning to the 
disorganised or nationalised factories' from which 
Capital has gone a-fighting, and to which it may 
never return. 



Ill 

NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 

The war has become a war of exhaustion. One 
hears a great deal of the idea that " financial col- 
lapse " may bring it to an end. A number of peo- 
ple seem to be convinced that a war cannot be waged 
without money, that soldiers must be paid, muni- 
tions must be bought ; that for this money is neces- 
sary and the consent of bank depositors ; so that if 
all the wealth of the world were nominally possessed 
by some one man in a little office he could stop the 
war by saying simply, " I will lend you no more 
money." 

Now, as a matter of fact, money is a power only 
in so far as people believe in it and Governments 
sustain it. If a State is sufficiently strong and well 
organised, its control over the money power is un- 
limited. If it can rule its people, and if it has the 
necessary resources of men and material within its 
borders, it can go on in a state of war so long as 
these things last, with almost any flimsy sort of 
substitute for money that it chooses to print. It 

50 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 51 

can enroll and use the men, and seize and work the 
material. It can take over the land and cultivate 
it and distribute its products. The little man in the 
office is only a power because the State chooses to 
recognise his claim. So long as he is convenient he 
seems to be a power. So soon as the State is intel- 
ligent enough and strong enough it can do without 
him. It can take what it wants, and tell him to 
go and hang himself. That is the melancholy ulti- 
mate of the usurer. That is the quintessence of 
" finance." All credit is State made, and what the 
State has made the State can alter or destroy. 

The owner and the creditor have never had any 
other power to give or withhold credit than the 
credit that was given to them. They exist by suf- 
ferance or superstition and not of necessity. 

It is the habit of overlooking this little flaw in 
the imperatives of ownership that enables people 
to say that this war cannot go on beyond such and 
such a date — the end of 1916 is much in favour just 
now — because we cannot pay for it. It would be 
about as reasonable to expect a battle to end because 
a landlord had ordered the soldiers off his estate. 
So long as there are men to fight and stuff to fight 
with the war can go on. There is bankruptcy, but 
the bankruptcy of States is not like the bankruptcy 



52 WHAT IS COMING? 

of individuals. There is no such thing as an undis- 
charged bankrupt who is forbidden to carry on 
among States. A State may keep on going bank- 
rupt indefinitely and still carry on. It will be the 
next step in our prophetic exercise to examine the 
differences between State bankruptcy and the bank- 
ruptcy of a subject of the State. 

The belligerent Powers are approaching a phase 
when they will no longer be paying anything like 
twenty shillings in the pound. In a very definite 
sense they are not paying twenty shillings in the 
pound now. That is not going to stop the war, but 
it involves a string of consequences and possibilities 
of the' utmost importance to our problem of what 
is coming when the war is over. 

The exhaustion that will bring this war to its end 
at last is a process of destruction of men and mate- 
rial. The process of bankruptcy that is also going 
on is nothing of the sort. Bankruptcy destroys no 
concrete thing; it merely writes off a debt; it de- 
stroys a financial but not an economic reality. It 
is, in itself, a mental, not a physical fact. "A" 
owes " B " a debt ; he goes bankrupt and pays a 
dividend, a fraction of his debt, and gets his dis- 
charge. " B's " feelings, as we novelists used to 
say, are " better imagined than described " ; he does 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 53 

his best to satisfy himself that " A " can pay no 
more, and then " A " and " B " both go about their 
business again. In England, if " A " is a suffi- 
ciently poor man not to be formidable, and has gone 
bankrupt on a small scale, he gets squeezed fero- 
ciously to extract the last farthing from him; he 
may find himself in jail and his home utterly 
smashed up. If he is a richer man, and has failed 
on a larger scale, our law is more sympathetic, and 
he gets off much more easily. Often his creditors 
find it advisable to arrange with him so that he will 
still carry on with his bankrupt concern. They 
find it better to let him carry on than to smash him 
up. There are countless men in the world living 
very comfortably indeed, and running businesses 
that were once their own property for their credit- 
ors. There are still more who have written off 
princely debts and do not seem to be a "ha'porth 
the worse." And their creditors have found a balm 
in time and philosophy. Bankruptcy is only pain- 
ful and destructive to small people and helpless 
people; but then for them everything is painful 
and destructive; it can be a very light matter 
to big people; it may be almost painless to a 
State. 

If England went bankrupt in the completest way 



54 WHAT IS COMING? 

to-morrow, and repudiated all its debts both as a 
nation and as a community of individuals, if it de- 
clared, if I may use a self-contradictory phrase, a 
permanent moratorium, there would be not an acre 
of ploughed land in the country, not a yard of cloth 
or a loaf of bread the less for that. There would 
be nothing material destroyed within the State. 
There would be no immediate convulsion. Use and 
wont would carry most people on some days before 
they even began to doubt whether So-and-so could 
pay his way, and whether there would be wages at 
the end of the week. 

But people who lived upon rent or investments 
or pensions would presently be very busy thinking 
how they were going to get food when the butcher 
and baker insisted upon cash. It would be only 
with comparative slowness that the bulk of men 
would realise that a fabric of confidence and confi- 
dent assumptions had vanished; that cheques and 
bank notes and token money and every sort of bond 
and scrip were worthless, that employers had noth- 
ing to pay with, shopkeepers no means of procuring 
stock, that metallic money was disappearing, and 
that a paralysis had come upon the community. 
Such an establishment as a workhouse or an old- 
fashioned monastery, living upon the produce of its 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 55 

own farming and supplying all its own labour, 
would be least embarrassed amidst the general per- 
plexity. For it would not be upon a credit basis, 
but a socialistic basis, a basis of direct reality, and 
its need for payments would be incidental. And 
land-owning peasants growing their own food would 
carry on, and small cultivating occupiers, who could 
easily fall back on barter for anything needed. But 
the mass of the population in such a country as 
England would soon be standing about in hopeless 
perplexity and on the verge of frantic panic — al- 
though there was just as much food to be eaten, just 
as many houses to live in, and just as much work 
needing to be done. Suddenly the pots would be 
empty, and famine would be in the land, although 
the farms and butchers' shops were still well 
stocked. The general community would be like an 
automobile when the magneto fails. Everything 
would be there and in order, except for the spark of 
credit which keeps the engine working. 

That is how quite a lot of people seem to imagine 
national bankruptcy : as a catastrophic jolt. It is 
a quite impossible nightmare of cessation. The 
reality is the completest contrast. All the bellig- 
erent countries of the world are at the present mo- 
ment quietly, steadily and progressively going 



56 WHAT IS COMING? 

bankrupt, and the mass of people are not even aware 
of this process of insolvency. 

An individual when he goes bankrupt is measured 
by the monetary standard of the country he is in ; 
he pays Hye or ten or fifteen or so many shillings in 
the pound. A community in debt does something 
which is in effect the same, but in appearance rather 
different. It still pays a pound, but the purchasing 
power of the pound has diminished. This is what 
is happening all over the world to-day; there is a 
rise in prices. This is automatic national bank- 
ruptcy ; unplanned, though perhaps not unforeseen. 
It is not a deliberate State act, but a consequence 
of the interruption of communications, the diver- 
sion of productive energy, the increased demand for 
many necessities by the Government and the general 
waste under war conditions. At the beginning of 
this war England had a certain national debt; it 
has paid off none of that original debt ; it has added 
to it tremendously; so far as money and bankers' 
records go it still owes and intends to pay that 
original debt; but if you translate the language of 
£ s. d. into realities, you will find that in loaves or 
iron or copper or hours of toil, or indeed in any 
reality except gold, it owes now, so far as that orig- 
inal debt goes, far less than it did at the outset. As 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 57 

the war goes on and the rise in prices continues, the 
subsequent borrowings and contracts are under- 
going a similar bankrupt reduction. The attempt 
of the landlord of small weekly and annual proper- 
ties to adjust himself to the new conditions by rais- 
ing rents is being checked by legislation in Great 
Britain, and has been completely checked in France. 
The attempts of labour to readjust wages have been 
partially successful in spite of the eloquent protests 
of those great exponents of plain living, economy, 
abstinence, and honest, modest, underpaid toil, 
Messrs. Asquith, McKenna, and Runciman. It is 
doubtful if the rise in wages is keeping pace with 
the rise in prices. So far as it fails to do so the 
load is on the usual pack animal, the poor man. 
The rest of the loss falls chiefly upon the creditor 
class, the people with fixed incomes and fixed sal- 
aries, the landlords who have let at long leases, the 
people with pensions, endowed institutions, the 
Church, insurance companies, and the like. They 
are all being scaled down. They are all more able 
to stand scaling down than the proletarians. 

Assuming that it is possible to bring up wages to 
the level of the higher prices, and that the rise in 
rents can be checked by legislation or captured by 
taxation, the rise in prices is, on the whole, a thing 



58 WHAT IS COMING? 

to the advantage of the propertyless man as against 
accumulated property. It writes off the past and 
clears the way for a fresh start in the future. An 
age of cheapness is an old usurer's age. England 
before the war was a paradise of ancient usuries; 
everywhere were great houses and enclosed parks; 
the multitude of gentlemen's servants and golf clubs 
and such like excrescences of the comfort of pros- 
perous people was perpetually increasing ; it did not 
" pay " to build labourers' cottages, and the more 
expensive sort of automobile had driven the bicycle 
as a pleasure vehicle off the roads. Western Eu- 
rope was running to fat and not to muscle, as 
America is to-day. 

But if that old usurer's age is over, the young 
usurer's age may be coming. To meet such enor- 
mous demands as this war is making there are three 
chief courses open to the modern State. The first 
is to take — to get men by conscription and material 
by requisition. The British Government takes 
more modestly than any other in the world ; its tra- 
dition from Magna Charta onward, the legal train- 
ing of most of its members, all make towards a rever- 
ence for private ownership and private claims, as 
opposed to the claims of State and commonweal, 
unequalled in the world's history. The next course 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 59 

of a nation in need is to tax and pay for what it 
wants, which is a fractional and more evenly dis- 
tributed method of taking. Both of these methods 
raise prices, the second most so, and so facilitate 
the automatic release of the future from the hoard- 
ing of the past. So far all the belligerent Govern- 
ments have taxed on the timid side. Finally there 
is the loan. This mortgages the future to the pres- 
ent necessity, and it has so far been the predominant 
source of war credits. It is the method that pro- 
duces least immediate friction in the State; it em- 
ploys all the savings of surplus income that the un- 
rest of civil enterprise leaves idle; it has an effect 
of creating property by a process that destroys the 
substance of the commuuity. In Germany an enor- 
mous bulk of property has been mortgaged to sup- 
ply the subscriptions to the war loans, and those 
holdings have again been hypothecated to subscribe 
to subsequent loans. The Pledged Allies with 
longer stockings have not yet got to this pitch of 
overlapping. But everywhere in Europe what is 
happening is a great transformation of the property 
owner into a rentier, and the passing of realty into 
the hands of the State. At the end of the war Great 
Britain will probably find herself with a national 
debt so great that she will be committed to the pay- 



60 WHAT IS COMING? 

ment of an annual interest greater in figures than 
the entire national expenditure before the war. As 
an optimistic lady put it the other day : " All the 
people who aren't killed will be living quite com- 
fortably on War Loan for the rest of their lives." 

But part, at least, of the bulk of this wealth will 
be imaginary rather than real because of the rise in 
prices, in wages, in rent, and in taxation. Most of 
us who are buying the British and French War 
Loans have no illusions on that score ; we know we 
are buying an income of diminishing purchasing 
power. Yet it would be a poor creature in these 
days when there is scarcely a possible young man 
in one's circle who has not quite freely and cheer- 
fully staked his life who was not prepared to con- 
sider his investments as being also to an undefined 
extent a national subscription. 

A rise in prices is not, however, the only process 
that will check the appearance of a new rich usurer 
class after the war. There is something else ahead 
that has happened already in Germany, that is 
quietly coming about among the Allies, and that is 
the cessation of gold payments. In Great Britain, 
of course, the pound note is still convertible into a 
golden sovereign; but Great Britain will not get 
through the war on those terms. There comes a 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 61 

point in the stress upon a Government when it must 
depart from the austerer line of financial rectitude 
— and tamper in some way with currency. Sooner 
or later, and probably in all cases before 1917, all 
the belligerents will be forced to adopt inconvertible 
paper money for their internal uses. There will be 
British assignats or greenbacks. It will seem to 
many financial sentimentalists almost as though 
Great Britain were hauling down a flag when the 
sovereign, which has already disappeared into bank 
and Treasury coffers, is locked up there and re- 
served for international trade. But Great Britain 
has other sentiments to consider than the finer feel- 
ings of bankers and the delicacies of usury. The 
pound British will come out of this war like a com- 
pany out of a well-shelled trench — attenuated. 

Depreciation of the currency means, of course, 
a continuing rise in prices, a continuing writing off 
of debt. If labour has any real grasp of its true 
interests it will not resent this. It will merely in- 
sist steadfastly — quite regardless of that eloquent 
trio of underpaid and parsimonious lawyers, 
Messrs. Asquith, McKenna, and Runciman — on a 
proper adjustment of its wages to the new standard. 
On that point, however, it will be better to write 
later. . . . 



62 WHAT IS COMING? 

Let us see how far we have got in this guessing. 
We have considered reasons that seem to point to 
the destruction of a great amount of old property 
and old debt, and the creation of a great volume 
of new debt before the end of the war, and we have 
adopted the ideas that currency will probably have 
depreciated more and more and prices risen right 
up to the very end. There will be by that time a 
general habit of saving throughout the community, 
a habit more firmly established perhaps in the prop- 
ertied than in the wages-earning class. People will 
be growing accustomed to a dear and insecure 
world. They will have become cautious, desirous 
of saving and security. Directly the phase of enor- 
mous war loans ends, the new class of rentiers hold- 
ing the various great new national loans will find 
themselves drawing this collectively vast income 
and anxious to invest it. They will for a time be 
receiving the bulk of the unearned income of the 
world. Here, in the high prices representing de- 
mand and the need for some reinvestment of inter- 
est representing supply, we have two of the chief 
factors that are supposed to be necessary to a phase 
of business enterprise. Will the economic history 
of the next few decades be the story of a restoration 
of the capitalistic system upon a new basis? Shall 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 63 

we all become investors, speculators, or workers 
toiling our way to a new period of security, cheap- 
ness and low interest, a restoration of the park, the 
enclosure, the gold standard and the big automobile, 
with only this difference — that the minimum wage 
will be somewhere about two pounds, and that a five- 
pound note will purchase about as much as a couple 
of guineas would do in 1913? 

That is practically parallel with what happened 
in the opening half of the nineteenth century after 
the Napoleonic wars, and it is not an agreeable out- 
look for those who love the common man or the no- 
bility of life. But if there is any one principle 
sounder than another of all those that guide the 
amateur in prophecy, it is that history never repeats 
itself. The human material in which those mone- 
tary changes and those developments of credit will 
occur will be entirely different from the social me- 
dium of a hundred years ago. 

The nature of the State has altered profoundly in 
the last century. The later eighteenth and earlier 
nineteenth centuries constituted a period of extreme 
individualism. What were called " economic 
forces " had unrestricted play. In the minds of 
such people as Harriet Martineau and Herbert 
Spencer they superseded God. People were no 



64 WHAT IS COMING? 

longer reproached for " flying in the face of Provi- 
dence," but for " flying in the face of Political Econ- 
omy." In that state of freedom you got whatever 
you could in any way you could ; you were not your 
neighbour's keeper, and except that it interfered 
with the enterprise of pickpockets, burglars and for- 
gers, and kept the dice loaded in favour of landlords 
and lawyers, the State stood aside from the great 
drama of human getting. For industrialism and 
speculation the State's guiding maxim was laissez 
faire. The State is now far less aloof and far 
more constructive. It is far more aware of itself 
and a common interest. Germany has led the way 
from a system of individuals and voluntary associa- 
tions in competition towards a new order of things, 
a completer synthesis. This most modern State is 
far less a swarming conflict of businesses than a 
great national business. It will emerge from this 
war much more so than it went in, and the thing is 
and will remain so plain and obvious that only the 
greediest and dullest people among the Pledged 
Allies will venture to disregard it. The Allied na- 
tions, too, will have to rescue their economic future 
from individual grab and grip and chance. 

The second consideration that forbids us to an- 
ticipate any parallelism of the history of 1915-45 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 65 

with 1815-45 is the greater lucidity of the general 
mind, the fact that all Western Europe, down to the 
agricultural labourers, can read and write and does 
read newspapers and "get ideas." The explana- 
tion of economic and social processes that were mys- 
terious to the elect a hundred years ago are now the 
commonplaces of the tap-room. What happened 
then darkly, and often unconsciously, must happen 
in 1916-26 openly and controllably. The current 
bankruptcy and liquidation and the coming recon- 
struction of the economic system of Europe will go 
on in a quite unprecedented amount of light. We 
shall see and know what is happening much more 
clearly than anything of the kind has ever been 
seen before. 

It is not only that people will have behind them, 
as a light upon what is happening, the experiences 
and discussions of a hundred years, but that the in- 
ternational situation will be far plainer than it has 
ever been. This war has made Germany the central 
fact in all national affairs about the earth. It is 
not going to destroy Germany, and it seems improb- 
able that either defeat or victory, or any mixture 
of these, will immediately alter the cardinal fact of 
Germany's organised aggressiveness. The war will 
not end the conflict of anti-Germany and Germany. 



66 WHAT IS COMING? 

That will only end when the results of fifty years 
of aggressive education in Germany have worn 
away. This will be so plain that the great bulk of 
people everywhere will not only see their changing 
economic relationships far more distinctly than 
such things have been seen hitherto, but that they 
will see them as they have never been seen before, 
definitely oriented to the threat of German world 
predominance. The landlord who squeezes, the 
workman who strikes and shirks, the lawyer who 
fogs and obstructs, will know, and will know that 
most people know, that what he does is done, not 
under an empty, regardless heaven, but in the face 
of an unsleeping enemy and in disregard of a con- 
tinuous urgent necessity for unity. 

So far we have followed this speculation upon 
fairly firm ground, but now our inquiry must plunge 
into a jungle of far more difficult and uncertain pos- 
sibilities. Our next stage brings us to the question 
of how people and peoples and classes of people are 
going to react to the new conditions of need and 
knowledge this war will have brought about, and 
to the new demands that will be made upon them. 
This is really a question of how far they will prove 
able to get out of the habits and traditions of their 
former social state, how far they will be able to 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 67 

take generous views and make sacrifices and unself- 
ish efforts, and how far they will go in self-seeking 
or class selfishness regardless of the common wel- 
fare. This is a question we have to ask separately 
of each great nation, and of the Central Powers as 
a whole, and of the Allies as a whole, before we can 
begin to estimate the posture of the peoples of the 
world in, say, 1946. 

Now let me here make a sort of parenthesis on 
human nature. It will be rather platitudinous, but 
it is a necessary reminder for what follows. 

So far as I have been able to observe, nobody lives 
steadily at one moral level. If we are wise we 
shall treat no man and no class — and for the mat- 
ter of that no nation — as either steadfastly malig- 
nant or steadfastly disinterested. There are phases 
in my life when I could die quite cheerfully for an 
idea; there are phases when I would not stir six 
yards to save a human life. Most people fluctuate 
between such extremes. Most people are self-seek- 
ing, but most people will desist from a self-seeking 
cause if they see plainly and clearly that it is not 
in the general interest, and much more readily if 
they also perceive that other people are of the same 
mind and know that they know their course is un- 
sound. The fundamental error of orthodox polit- 



68 WHAT IS COMING? 

ical economy and of Marxian socialism is to as- 
sume the inveterate selfishness of every one. But 
most people are a little more disposed to believe 
what it is to their interest to believe than the con- 
trary. Most people abandon with reluctance ways 
of living and doing that have served them well. 
Most people can see the neglect of duty in other 
classes more plainly than they do in their own. 
This war has brought back into the everyday human 
life of Europe the great and overriding conception 
of devotion to a great purpose. But that does not 
imply clear-headedness in correlating the ways of 
one's ordinary life with this great purpose. It is no 
good treating as cynical villainy things that merely 
exhibit the incapacity of our minds to live con- 
sistently. One Labour paper a month or so ago 
was contrasting Mr. Asquith's eloquent appeals to 
the working man to economise and forgo any rise 
in wages with the photographs that were appearing 
simultaneously in the smart papers of the very 
smart marriage of Mr. Asquith's daughter. I sub- 
mit that by that sort of standard none of us will be 
blameless. But without any condemnation, it is 
easy to understand that the initiative to tax almost 
to extinction large automobiles, wedding dresses, 
champagne, pate de foie gras and enclosed parks, 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 69 

instead of gin and water, bank holiday outings and 
Virginia shag, is less likely to come from the Prime 
Minister class than from the class of dock labourers. 
There is an unconscious class war due to habit and 
insufficient thinking and insufficient sympathy that 
will play a large part in the distribution of the 
burthen of the State bankruptcy that is in progress, 
and in the subsequent readjustment of national life. 

And having made this parenthesis, I may perhaps 
go on to point out the peculiar limitations under 
which various classes will be approaching the phase 
of reorganisation, without being accused of mak- 
ing this or that class the villain of an anticipatory 
drama. 

Now, three great classes will certainly resist the 
valiant reconstruction of economic life with a vig- 
our in exact proportion to their baseness, stupidity 
and narrowness of outlook. They will, as classes, 
come up for a moral judgment, on whose verdict the 
whole future of Western civilisation depends. If 
they cannot achieve a considerable, an unprec- 
edented display of self-sacrifice, unselfish wisdom, 
and constructive vigour, if the community as a 
whole can produce no forces sufficient to restrain 
their lower tendencies, then the intelligent father 
had better turn his children's faces towards the 



70 WHAT IS COMING? 

New World. For Europe will be busy with social 
disorder for a century. 

The first great class is the class that owns and 
holds land and land-like claims upon the commun- 
ity, from the Throne downward. This Court and 
land-holding class cannot go on being rich and liv- 
ing rich during the strains of the coming years. 
The reconstructing world cannot bear it. What- 
ever rises in rent may occur through the rise in 
prices, must go to meet the tremendous needs of the 
State. This class, which, has so much legislative 
and administrative power in at least three of the 
great belligerents — in Great Britain and Germany 
perhaps most so — must be prepared to see itself 
taxed, and must be willing to assist in its own taxa- 
tion to the very limit of its statistical increment. 
The almost vindictive greed of the landowners that 
blackened the history of England after Waterloo, 
and brought Great Britain within sight of revolu- 
tion, must not be repeated. The British Empire 
cannot afford a revolution in the face of the Central 
European Powers. But in the past century there 
has been an enormous change in men's opinions and 
consciences about property; whereas we were In- 
dividualists, now we are Socialists. The British 
lord, the German junker, has none of the sense of 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 71 

unqualified rights that his great-grandfather had, 
and he is aware of a vigour of public criticism that 
did not exist in the former time. . . . How far will 
these men get out of the tradition of their birth and 
upbringing? 

Next comes the great class of lawyers who, 
through the idiotic method of voting in use in mod- 
ern democracies, are able practically to rule Great 
Britain, and who are powerful and influential in 
all democratic countries. In order to secure a cer- 
tain independence and integrity in its courts, Great 
Britain long ago established the principle of enor- 
mously overpaying its judges and lawyers. The 
natural result has been to give our law courts and 
the legal profession generally a bias in favour of 
private wealth against both the public interest and 
the proletariat. It has also given om\ higher na- 
tional education an overwhelming direction towards 
the training of advocates and against science and 
constructive statecraft. An ordinary lawyer has 
no idea of making anything; that tendency has been 
destroyed in his mind ; he waits and sees and takes 
advantage of opportunity. Everything that can 
possibly be done in England is done to make our 
rulers Micawbers and Artful Dodgers. And one 
of the most anxious questions that a Briton can ask 



72 WHAT IS COMING? 

himself to-day is just how far the gigantic suffer- 
ings and still more monstrous warnings of this war 
have shocked the good gentlemen who must steer 
the ship of State through the strong rapids of the 
New Peace out of this forensic levity their training 
has imposed upon them. . . . There, again, there 
are elements of hope. The lawyer has heard much 
about himself in the past few years. His conscience 
may check his tradition. And we have a Press — 
it has many faults, but it is no longer a lawyer's 
Press. . . . 

And the third class which has immediate interests 
antagonistic to bold reconstructions of our national 
methods is that vaguer body, the body of investing 
capitalists, the savers, the usurers, who live on divi- 
dends. It is a vast class, but a feeble class in com- 
parison with the other two ; it is a body rather than 
a class, a weight rather than a power. It consists 
of all sorts of people with nothing in common ex- 
cept the receipt of unearned income. . . . 

All these classes, by instinct and the baser kinds 
of reason also, will be doing their best to check the 
rise in prices, stop and reverse the advance in wages, 
prevent the debasement of the circulation, and facil- 
itate the return to a gold standard and a repressive 
social stability. They will be resisting any com- 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 73 

prehensive national reconstruction, any increase in 
public officials, any " conscription " of land or rail- 
ways or what not for the urgent civil needs of the 
State. They will have fighting against these tend- 
encies something in their own consciences, some- 
thing in public opinion, the tradition of public de- 
votion their own dead sons have revived — and cer- 
tain other forces. 

They will have over against them the obvious 
urgent necessities of the time. 

The most urgent necessity will be to get back the 
vast moiety of the population that has been en- 
gaged either in military service or the making of 
munitions to productive work, to the production of 
food and necessary things, and to the restoration 
of that export trade which, in the case of Great 
Britain at least, now that her overseas investments 
have been set off by overseas war debts, is essential 
to the food supply. There will be coming back into 
civil life, not merely thousands, but millions of men 
who have been withdrawn from it. They will feel 
that they have deserved well of their country. 
They will have had their imaginations greatly 
quickened by being taken away from the homes and 
habits to which they were accustomed. They will 
have been well fed and inured to arms, to danger, 



74 WHAT IS COMING? 

and the chances of death. They will have no illu- 
sions about the conduct of the war by the governing 
classes, or the worshipful heroism of peers and 
princes. They will know just how easy is courage, 
and how hard is hardship, and the utter impossi- 
bility of doing well in war or peace under the orders 
of detected fools. 

This vast body will constitute a very stimulating 
congregation of spectators in any attempt on the 
part of landlord, lawyer and investor to resume the 
old political mystery dance, in which rents are to 
be sent up and wages down, while the old feuds of 
Wales and Ireland, ancient theological and sectar- 
ian jealousies and babyish loyalties, and so forth are 
to be waved in the eyes of the no longer fascinated 
realist. 

" Meanwhile," they will say, with a stiff impa- 
tience unusual in their class, "about usf " . . . 

Here are the makings of internal conflict in every 
European country. In Russia the landlord and 
lawyer, in France the landlord, are perhaps of less 
account, and in France the investor is more uni- 
versal and jealous. In Germany, where Junker and 
Court are most influential and brutal, there is a 
larger and sounder and broader tradition of prac- 
tical efficiency, a modernised legal profession, and 



NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 75 

a more widely diffused scientific imagination. 

How far in each country will imagination tri- 
umph over tradition and individualism? How far 
does the practical bankruptcy of Western civilisa- 
tion mean a revolutionary smash-up, and a phase 
that may last for centuries, of disorder and more 
and more futile conflict? And how far does it mean 
a reconstruction of human society, within a few 
score of years, upon sounder and happier lines? 
Must that reconstruction be preceded by a revolu- 
tion in all or any of the countries? 

To what extent can the world produce the imag- 
ination it needs? That, so far, is the most funda- 
mental question to which our prophetic explorations 
have brought us. 



IV 

BRAINTREE, BOOKING, AND THE 
FUTURE OF THE WORLD 

Will the war be followed by a period of great dis- 
tress, social disorder and a revolution in Europe, 
or shall we pull through the crisis without violent 
disaster? May we even hope that Great Britain 
will step straight out of the war into a phase of 
restored and increasing welfare? 

Like most people I have been trying to form some 
sort of answer to this question. My state of mind 
in the last few months has varied from a consider- 
able optimism to profound depression. I have met 
and talked to quite a number of young men in khaki : 
ex-engineers, ex-lawyers, ex-schoolmasters, ex-busi- 
ness men of all sorts ; and the net result of these in- 
terviews has been a buoyant belief that there is in 
Great Britain the pluck, the will, the intelligence 
to do anything, however arduous and difficult, in 
the way of national reconstruction. And on the 
other hand there is a certain stretch of road between 

Dunmow and Coggeshall. . . . 

76 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 77 

That stretch of road is continually jarring with 
my optimistic thoughts. It is a strongly pro-Ger- 
man piece of road. It supports allegations against 
Great Britain, as for instance that the British are 
quite unfit to control their own affairs, let alone 
those of an empire; that they are an incompetent 
people, a pig-headedly stupid people, a wasteful peo- 
ple, a people incapable of realising that a man who 
tills his field badly is a traitor and a weakness to his 
country. . . . 

Let me place the case of this high road through 
Braintree (Bocking intervening) before the reader. 
It is, you will say perhaps, very small beer. But a 
straw shows the way the wind blows. It is a trivial 
matter of road metal, mud, and water-pipes, but it 
is also diagnostic of the essential difficulties in the 
way of the smooth and rapid reconstruction of 
Great Britain — and very probably of the recon- 
struction of all Europe — after the war. The 
Braintree high road, I will confess, becomes at times 
an image of the world for me. It is a poor, spirit- 
less-looking bit of road, with raw stones on one side 
of it. It is also, I perceive, the high destiny of man 
in conflict with mankind. It is the way to Harwich, 
Holland, Russia, China, and the whole wide world. 

Even at the first glance it impresses one as not 



78 WHAT IS COMING? 

being the road that would satisfy an energetic and 
capable people. It is narrow for a high road, and 
in the middle of it one is checked by an awkward 
bend, by cross roads that are not exactly cross 
roads, so that one has to turn two blind corners to 
get on eastward, and a policeman, I don't know at 
what annual cost, has to be posted to nurse the 
traffic across. Beyond that point one is struck by 
the fact that the south side is considerably higher 
than the north, that storm water must run from 
the south side to the north and lie there. It does, 
and the north side has recently met the trouble by 
putting down raw flints, and so converting what 
would be a lake into a sort of flint pudding. Con- 
sequently one drives one's car as much as possible 
on the south side of this road. There is a sugges- 
tion of hostility and repartee between north and 
south side in this arrangement, which the explorer's 
enquiries will confirm. It may be only an acci- 
dental parallelism with profounder fact; I do not 
know. But the middle of this high road is a fron- 
tier. The south side belongs to the urban district 
of Braintree ; the north to the rural district of Bock- 
ing. 

If the curious enquirer will take pick and shovel 
he will find at any rate one corresponding dualism 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 79 

below the surface. He will find a Booking water 
main supplying the houses on the north side and 
a Braintree water main supplying the south. I 
rather suspect that the drains are also in duplicate. 
The total population of Bocking and Braintree is 
probably little more than thirteen thousand souls 
altogether, but for that there are two water sup- 
plies, two sets of schools, two administrations. To 
the passiug observer the rurality of the Bocking 
side is indistinguishable from the urbanity of the 
Braintree side; it is just a little muddier. But 
there are dietetic differences. If you will present 
a Bocking rustic with a tin of the canned fruit that 
is popular with the Braintree townsfolk, you dis- 
cover one of these differences. A dustman peram- 
bulates the road on the Braintree side, and canned 
food becomes possible and convenient therefore. 
But the Braintree grocers sell canned food with 
difficulty into Bocking. Bocking, less fortunate 
than its neighbour, has no dustman apparently, and 
is left with the tin on its hands. It can either bury 
it in its garden — if it has a garden — take it out 
for a walk wrapped in paper and drop it quietly in 
a ditch, if possible in the Braintree area, or build 
a cairn with it and its predecessors and successors 
in honour of the Local Government Board (Presi- 



80 WHAT IS COMING? 

dent -£5000, Parliamentary Secretary £1500, Per- 
manent Secretary £2000, Legal Advisor £1000 up- 
ward, a total administrative expenditure of over 
£300,000 . . . ). In death Bocking and Brain- 
tree are still divided. They have their separate 
cemeteries. . . . 

Now to any disinterested observer there lies about 
the Braintree-Bocking railway station one com- 
munity. It has common industries and common in- 
terests. There is no octroi or anything of that sort, 
across the street. The shops and inns on the Bock- 
ing side of the main street are indistinguishable 
from those on the Braintree side. The inhabitants 
of the two communities intermarry freely. If this 
absurd separation did not exist no one would have 
the impudence to establish it now. It is wasteful, 
unfair (because the Bocking piece is rather better 
off than Braintree and with fewer people, so that 
there is a difference in the rates) and for nine-tenths 
of the community it is more or less of a nuisance. 
It is also a nuisance to the passing public because 
of such inconvenience as the asymmetrical main 
road. It hinders local development and the devel- 
opment of a local spirit. It may of course appeal 
perhaps to the humorous outlook of the followers 
of Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, who believe 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 81 

that this war is really a war in the interests of 
the Athanasian Creed, fatness, and unrestricted 
drink against science, discipline, and priggishly 
keeping fit enough to join the army, as very good 
fun indeed, good matter for some jolly reeling ballad 
about Roundabout and Roundabout, the jolly town 
of Roundabout ; but to any one else the question of 
how it is that this wasteful Bocking-Braintree mud- 
dle, with its two boards, its two clerks, its two series 
of jobs and contracts, manages to keep on, was even 
before the war a sufficiently discouraging one. It 
becomes now a quite crucial problem. Because the 
muddle between the sides of the main road through 
Bocking and Braiutree is not an isolated instance ; 
it is a fair sample of the way things are done in 
Great Britain; it is an intimation of the way in 
which the great task of industrial resettlement that 
the nation must face may be attempted. 

It is — or shall I write, " it may be " ? 

That is just the question I do not settle in my 
mind. I would like to think that I have hit upon 
a particularly bad case of entangled local govern- 
ment. But it happens that whenever I have looked 
into local affairs I have found the same sort of 
waste and — insobriety of arrangement. When I 
started, a little while back, to go to Braintree to 



82 WHAT IS COMING? 

verify these particulars, I was held up by a flood 
across the road between Little Easton and Dunmow. 
Every year that road is flooded and impassable for 
some days, because a bit of the affected stretch is 
under the County Council and a bit under the Lit- 
tle Easton parish council, and they cannot agree 
about the contribution of the latter. These things 
bump against the most unworldly. And when one 
goes up the scale from the urban district and rural 
district boundaries, one finds equally crazy county 
arrangements, the same tangle of obstacle in the 
way of quick, effective co-ordinations, the same 
needless multiplicity of clerks, the same rich possi- 
bilities of litigation, misunderstanding, and dead- 
locks of opinion between areas whose only differ- 
ence is that a mischievous boundary has been left 
in existence between them. And so on up to West- 
minster. And to still greater things. . . . 

I know perfectly well how unpleasant all this is 
to read, this outbreak at two localities that have 
never done me any personal harm except a little 
mud-splashing. But this is a thing that has to be 
said now, because we are approaching a crisis when 
dilatory ways, muddle, and waste may utterly ruin 
us. This is the way things have been done in Eng- 
land, this is our habit of procedure, and if they are 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 83 

done in this way after the war this Empire is going 
to smash. 

Let me add at once that it is quite possible that 
things are done almost as badly or quite as badly 
in Russia or France or Germany or America ; I am 
drawing no comparisons. All of us human beings 
were made, I believe, of very similar clay, and very 
similar causes have been at work everywhere. Only 
that excuse, so popular in England, will not pre- 
vent a smash if we stick to the old methods under 
the stresses ahead. I do not see that it is any con- 
solation to share in a general disaster. 

And I am sure that there must be the most de- 
lightful and picturesque reasons why we have all 
this overlapping and waste and muddle in our local 
affairs; why, to take another example, the bound- 
ary of the Essex parishes of Newton and Widding- 
ton looks as though it had been sketched out by a 
drunken man in a runaway cab with a broken 
spring. This Bocking-Braintree main road is, it 
happens, an old Stane Street, along which Roman 
legions marched to clean up the councils and clerks 
of the British tribal system two thousand years ago, 
and no doubt an historian could spin delightful 
consequences ; this does not alter the fact that these 
quaint complications in English affairs mean in the 



84 WHAT IS COMING? 

aggregate enormous obstruction and waste of hu- 
man energy. It does not alter the much graver fact, 
the fact that darkens all my outlook upon the fu- 
ture, that we have never yet produced evidence of 
any general disposition at any time to straighten 
out or even suspend these fumbling intricacies and 
ineptitudes. Never so far has there appeared in 
British affairs that divine passion to do things in 
the clearest, cleanest, least wasteful, most thorough 
manner, that is needed to straighten out for example 
these universal local tangles. Always we have been 
content with the old intricate, expensive way, and 
to this day we follow it. . . . 

And what I want to know, what I would like to 
feel much surer about than I do, is, is this in our 
blood? Or is it only the deep-seated habit of long 
ages of security, long years of margins so ample, 
that no waste seemed altogether wicked. Is it, in 
fact, a hopeless and ineradicable trait, that we stick 
to extravagance and confusion? 

What I would like to think possible at the pres- 
ent time, up and down the scale from parish to 
province, is something of this sort. Suppose the 
clerk of Braintree went to the clerk of Bocking and 
said : " Look here, one of us could do the work of 
both of us, as well or better. The easy times are 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 85 

over, and offices as well as men should be prepared 
to die for their country. Shall we toss to see who 
shall do it, and let the other man go off to find 
something useful to do? " Then I could believe.* 
Suppose the people of Braintree and Bocking, not 
waiting for that lead, said ; " But this is absurd ! 
Let us have an identical council and one clerk and 
get ahead, instead of keeping up this silly pretence 
that one town is two." Suppose some one of that 
300,000 pounds' worth of gentlemen at the Local 
Government Board set to work to replan our local 
government areas generally on less comic lines. 
Suppose his official superiors helped instead of snub- 
bing him. . . . 

I see nothing of the sort happening. I see every- 
where, wary watchful little men, thinking of them- 
selves, thinking of their parish, thinking close, hold- 
ing tight. . . . 

I know that there is a whole web of excuses for 
all these complicated, wasteful, and obstructive ar- 

* Such acts of virtue happen in the United States. Here is 
a quotation from the New York World of February 15th, 191G : 

" For two unusual acts Henry Bruere may be remembered 
by New York longer than nine days. Early in his incumbency 
he declared that his office was superfluous and should be abol- 
ished, the Comptroller assuming its duties. He now abolishes 
by resignation his own connection with it, in spite of its $12,000 
salary." 



86 WHAT IS COMING? 

rangements of our local government, these arrange- 
ments that I have taken merely as a sample of the 
general human way of getting affairs done. For it 
is affairs at large I am writing about, as I warned 
the reader at the beginning. Directly one enquires 
closely into any human muddle, one finds all sorts 
of reasonable rights and objections and claims bar- 
ring the way to any sweeping proposals. I can 
quite imagine that Bocking has admirable reasons 
for refusing coalescence with Braintree, except upon 
terms that Braintree could not possibly consider. 
I can quite understand that there are many incon- 
veniences and arguable injustices that would be 
caused by a merger of the two areas. I have no 
doubt it would mean serious loss to So-and-so, and 
quite novel and unfair advantage to So-and-so. It 
would take years to work the thing and get down 
to the footing of one water supply and an ambidex- 
trous dustman on the lines of perfect justice and 
satisfactoriness all round. But what I want to 
maintain is that these little immediate claims and 
rights and vested interests and bits of justice and 
fairness are no excuse at all for preventing things 
being done in the clear, clean, large, quick way. 
They never constituted a decent excuse, and now 
they excuse waste and delay and inconvenience less 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 87 

than ever. Let us first do things in the sound way, 
and then, if we can, let us pet and compensate any 
disappointed person who used to profit by their be- 
ing done roundabout instead of earning an honest 
living. We are beginning to agree that reasonably 
any man may be asked to die for his country ; what 
we have to recognise is that any man's proprietor- 
ship, interest, claims or rights may just as properly 
be called upon to die. Bocking and Braintree and 
Mr. John Smith — Mr. John Smith, the ordinary 
comfortable man with a stake in the country — 
have been thinking altogether too much of the 
claims and rights and expectations and economies 
of Bocking and Braintree and Mr. John Smith. 
They have to think now in a different way. . . . 

Just consider the work of reconstruction that 
Great Britain alone will have to face in the next 
year or so. (And her task is if anything less than 
that of any of her antagonists or Allies, except 
Japan and Italy. ) She has now probably from six 
to ten million people in the British Isles, men and 
women, either engaged directly in warfare or in the 
manufacture of munitions or in employments such 
as transit, nursing, and so forth, directly subserving 
these main ends. At least five-sixths of these mil- 
lions must be got back to employment of a different 



88 WHAT IS COMING? 

character within a year of the coming of peace. 
Everywhere manufacture, trade, and transit has 
been disorganised, disturbed, or destroyed. A new 
economic system has to be put together within a 
brief score or so of weeks ; great dislocated masses 
of population have to be fed, kept busy and dis- 
tributed in a world financially strained and abound- 
ing in wounded, cripples, widows, orphans and help- 
less people. In the next year or so the lives of half 
the population will have to be fundamentally read- 
justed. Here is work for administrative giants, 
work for which no powers can be excessive. It will 
be a task quite difficult enough to do even without 
the opposition of legal rights, haggling owners, and 
dexterous profiteers. It would be a giant's task if 
all the necessary administrative machinery existed 
now in the most perfect condition. How is this 
tremendous job going to be done if every Bocking 
in the country is holding out for impossible terms 
from Braintree, and every Braintree holding out for 
impossible terms from Bocking, while the road out 
remains choked and confused between them ; and if 
every John Smith with a claim is insisting upon 
his reasonable expectation of profits or dividends, 
his reasonable solatium and compensation for get- 
ting out of the way? I would like to record my 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 89 

conviction that if the business of this great crisis is 
to be done in the same spirit, the jealous, higgling, 
legal spirit that I have seen prevailing in British 
life throughout my half century of existence, it will 
not in any satisfactory sense of the phrase get done 
at all. This war has greatly demoralised and dis- 
credited the governing class in Great Britain, and 
if big masses of unemployed and unfed people, no 
longer strung up by the actuality of war, masses 
now trained to arms and with many quite sympa- 
thetic officers available, are released clumsily and 
planlessly into a world of risen prices and rising 
rents, of legal obstacles and forensic complications, 
of greedy speculators and hampered enterprises, 
there will be insurrection and revolution. There 
will be bloodshed in the streets and the chasing of 
rulers. 

There will be, if we do seriously attempt to put 
the new wine of humanity, the new crude fermenta- 
tions at once so hopeful and so threatening, that the 
war has released, into the old administrative bot- 
tles that served our purposes before the war. 

I believe that for old lawyers and old politicians 
and " private ownership " to handle the great prob- 
lem of reconstruction after the war in the spirit in 
which our affairs were conducted before the war, is 



90 WHAT IS COMING? 

about as hopeful an enterprise as if an elderly job- 
bing bricklayer, working on strict trade-union rules, 
set out to stop the biggest avalanche that ever came 
down a mountain side. And since I am by no means 
altogether pessimistic, in spite of my qualmy phases, 
it follows that I do not believe that the old spirit 
will necessarily prevail. I do not, because I be- 
lieve that in the past few decades a new spirit has 
come into human affairs ; that our ostensible rulers 
and leaders have been falling behind the times, and 
that in the young and the untried, in, for example, 
the young European of thirty and under, who is now 
in such multitudes thinking over life, and his se- 
niors in the trenches, there are still unsuspected re- 
sources of will and capacity, new mental possibili- 
ties and new mental habits, that entirely disturb the 
argument — based on the typical case of Bocking and 
Braintree — for a social catastrophe after the war. 

How best can this new spirit be denned? 

It is the creative spirit as distinguished from the 
legal spirit ; it is the spirit of courage to make and 
not the spirit that waits and sees and claims ; it is 
the spirit that looks to the future and not to the 
past. It is the spirit that makes Bocking forget 
that it is not Braintree and John Smith forget that 
he is John Smith, and both remember that they are 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 91 

England. For every one there are two diametri- 
cally different ways of thinking about life ; there is 
individualism, the way that comes as naturally as 
the grunt from a pig, of thinking outwardly from 
oneself as the centre of the universe, and there is 
the way that every religion is trying in some form 
to teach, of thinking back to oneself from greater 
standards and realities. There is the Braintree 
that is Braintree against England and the world, 
giving as little as possible and getting the best of 
the bargain, and there is the Braintree that identi- 
fies itself with England and asks how can we do 
best for the world with this little place of ours, how 
can we educate best, produce most, and make our 
roads straight and good for the world to go through. 
Every American knows the district that sends its 
congressman to Washington for the good of his dis- 
trict, and the district, the rarer district, that sends 
a man to work for the United States. There is the 
John Smith who feels toward England and the 
world as a mite feels toward its cheese, and the John 
Smith who feels toward his country as a sheep-dog 
feels toward the flock. The former is the spirit of 
individualism, " business/' and our law, the latter 
the spirit of socialism and science and — khaki. 
. . . They are both in all of us, they fluctuate from 



92 WHAT IS COMING? 

day to day; first one is ascendent and then the 
other. War does not so much tilt the balance as 
accentuate the difference. One rich British land- 
owner sneaks off to New York State to set up a 
home there and evade taxation; another turns his 
mansion into a hospital and goes off to help Serbian 
refugees. Acts of baseness or generosity are con- 
tagious; this man will give himself altogether be- 
cause of a story of devotion, this man declares he 
will do nothing until Sir F. E. Smith goes to the 
front. And the would-be prophet of what is going 
to happen must guess the relative force of these 
most impalpable and uncertain things. 

This Braintree-Bocking boundary which runs 
down the middle of the road is to be found all over 
the world. You will find it in Ireland and the 
gentlemen who trade on the jealousies of the north 
side and the gentlemen who trade on the jealousies 
of the south. You will find it in England among 
the good people who would rather wreck the Em- 
pire than work honestly and fairly with Labour. 
There are not only parish boundaries but park 
boundaries and class and sect boundaries. You 
will find the Bocking-Braintree line too at a dozen 
points on a small scale map of Europe. . . . These 
Braintree-Bocking lines are the barbed wire en- 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 93 

tanglements between us and the peace of the world. 
Against these entanglements in every country the 
new spirit struggles in many thousands of minds. 
Where will it be strongest? Which country will get 
clear first, get most rapidly to work again, have least 
of the confusion and wrangling that must in some 
degree occur everywhere? Will any country go al- 
together to pieces in hopeless incurable discord? 

Now I believe that the answer to that last ques- 
tion is " No." And my reason for that answer is 
the same as my reason for believing that the asso- 
ciation of the Pledged Allies will not break up after 
the war; it is that I believe that this war is going 
to end not in the complete smashing up and sub- 
jugation of either side, but in a general exhaustion 
that will make the recrudescence of the war still 
possible but very terrifying. 

Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs 
for the next two decades and the speech of Mars is 
blunt and plain. He will say to us all : " Get your 
houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, 
waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and 
shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon 
you again. I have taken all your men between 
eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I 
pleased; millions of them. I have wasted your sub- 



94 WHAT IS COMING? 

stance — contemptuously. Now, mark you, you 
have multitudes of male children between the ages 
of nine and nineteen running about among you. 
Delightful and beloved boys. And behind them 
come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have 
scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred 
thousand perhaps by the way. But go on mud- 
dling, each for himself and his parish and his family 
and none for all the world, go on in the old way, 
stick to your ' rights,' stick to your ' claims, 1 each 
one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices, 
obstruct, waste, squabble, and presently I will come 
back again and take all that fresh harvest of life I 
have spared, all those millions that are now sweet 
children and dear little boys and youths, and I will 
squeeze it into red pulp between my hands, I will 
mix it with the mud of trenches and feast on it be- 
fore your eyes, even more damnably than I have 
done with your grown-up sons and young men. 
And I have taken most of your superfluities al- 
ready; next time I will take your barest necessi- 
ties." 

So — the red god, Mars ; and in these days of uni- 
versal education the great mass of people will un- 
derstand plainly now that that is his message and 
intention. Men who cannot be swayed by the love 



THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 95 

of order and creation may be swayed by the thought 
of death and destruction. . . . There, I think, is the 
overriding argument that will burst the proprietor- 
ships and divisions and boundaries, the web of in- 
effectiveness that has held the world so long. 
Labour returning from the trenches to its country 
and demanding promptness, planning, generous and 
devoted leaderships and organisation, demanding 
that the usurer and financier, the landlord and law- 
yer shall, if need be, get themselves altogether out 
of the way, will have behind its arguments the 
thought of the enemy still unsubdued, still formid- 
able, recovering. Both sides will feel that. This 
world is a more illuminated world than in 1816; a 
thousand questions between law and duty have been 
discussed since then; beyond all comparison we 
know better what we are doing. I think the broad 
side of John Smith (and Sir John Smith and John 
Smith, K. C.) will get the better of his narrow 
ends — and that so it will be with Jean Dupont and 
Hans Meyer and the rest of them. There may be 
riots here and there ; there may be some pretty con- 
siderable rows ; but I do not think there is going to 
be a chaotic and merely destructive phase in Great 
Britain or any Western European country. I cast 
my guess for reconstruction and not for revolt. 



HOW FAR WILL EUROPE GO TOWARDS 
SOCIALISM? 

A number of people are saying that this war is to 
be the end of Individualism. " Go as you please " 
has had its death-blow. Out of this war, whatever- 
else emerges, there will emerge a more highly organ- 
ised State than existed before — that is to say, a 
less individualistic and more socialistic State. 
And there seems a heavy weight of probability on 
the side of this view. But there are also a number 
of less obvious countervailing considerations that 
may quite possibly modify or reverse this tendency. 
In .this chapter an attempt is to be made to strike a 
balance between the two systems of forces, and guess 
how much will be private and how much public in 
Europe in 1930, or thereabouts. 

The prophets who foretell the coming of Social- 
ism base their case on three sets of arguments. 
They point out, first, the failure of individual enter- 
prise to produce a national efficiency comparable to 
the partial State Socialism of Germany, and the ex- 
traordinary special dangers inherent in private 

96 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 97 

property that the war has brought to light; sec- 
ondly, to the scores of approaches to practical 
Socialism that have been forced upon Great Britain 
— for example, by the needs of the war; and, 
thirdly, to the obvious necessities that will confront 
the British Empire and the Allies generally after 
the war — necessities that no unorganised private 
effort can meet. All these arguments involve the 
assumption that the general understanding of the 
common interest will be sufficient to override indi- 
vidual and class motives; an exceedingly doubtful 
assumption, to say the least of it. But the general 
understanding of the common interest is most likely 
to be kept alive by the sense of a common danger, 
and we have already arrived at the conclusion that 
Germany is going to be defeated but not destroyed 
in this war, and that she will be left with sufficient 
vitality and sufficient resentment and sufficient of 
her rancid cultivated nationalism to make not only 
the continuance of the Alliance after the war obvi- 
ously advisable and highly probable, but also to 
preserve in the general mind for a generation or so 
that sense of a common danger which most effect- 
ually conduces to the sweeping aside of merely per- 
sonal and wasteful claims. Into the consequences 
of this we have now to look a little more closely. 



98 WHAT IS COMING? 

It was the weaknesses of Germany that made this 
war, and not her strength. The weaknesses of Ger- 
many are her Imperialism, her Junkerism, and her 
intense sentimental Nationalism; for the former 
would have no German ascendency that was not 
achieved by force, and, with the latter, made the 
idea of German ascendency intolerable to all man- 
kind. Better death, we said. And had Germany 
been no more than her Court, her Junkerism, her 
Nationalism, the whole system would have smashed 
beneath the contempt and indignation of the world 
within a year. 

But the strength of Germany has saved her from 
that destruction. She was at once the most archaic 
and modern of states. She was Hohenzollern, 
claiming to be Caesar, and flaunting a flat black 
eagle borrowed from Imperial Rome; and also she 
was the most scientific and socialist of states. It 
is her science and her Socialism that have held and 
forced back the avengers of Belgium for more than 
a year and a half. If she has failed as a conqueror, 
she has succeeded as an organisation. Her ambi- 
tion has been thwarted, and her method has been 
vindicated. She will, I think, be so far defeated in 
the contest of endurance which is now in progress 
that she will have to give up every scrap of terri- 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 99 

torial advantage she has gained ; she may lose most 
of her Colonial Empire ; she may be obliged to com- 
plete her modernisation by abandoning her militant 
Imperialism; but she will have at least the satis- 
faction of producing far profounder changes in the 
chief of her antagonists than those she herself will 
undergo. The Germany of the Hohenzollerns had 
its mortal wound at the Marne; the Germany we 
fight to-day is the Germany of Krupp and Ostwald. 
It is merely as if she had put aside a mask that had 
blinded her. She was methodical and civilised ex- 
cept for her head and aim ; she will become entirely 
methodical. But the Britain and Russia and 
France she fights are lands full of the spirit of un- 
defined novelty. They are being made over far 
more completely. They are being made over, not 
in spite of the war, but because of the war. Only 
by being made over can they win the war. And if 
they do not win the war, then they are bound to be 
made over. They are not merely putting aside old 
things, but they are forming and organising within 
themselves new structures, new and more efficient 
relationships, that will last far beyond the still re- 
mote peace settlement. 

What this war has brought home to the conscious- 
ness of every intelligent man outside the German 



100 WHAT IS COMING? 

system, with such thoroughness as whole genera- 
tions of discussion and peace experience could never 
have achieved, is a double lesson : that Germany had 
already gone far to master when she blundered into 
the war; firstly, the waste and dangers of individ- 
ualism, and, secondly, the imperative necessity of 
scientific method in public affairs. The waste and 
dangers of individualism have had a whole series 
of striking exemplifications both in Europe and 
America since the war began. Were there such a 
thing as a Socialist propaganda in existence, were 
the so-called contemporary socialistic organisations 
anything better than a shabby little back-door into 
contemporary politics, those demonstrations would 
be hammering at the mind of every one. It may be 
interesting to recapitulate some of the most salient 
instances. 

The best illustration, perhaps, of the waste that 
arises out of individualism is to be found in the ex- 
treme dislocation of the privately owned transit 
services of Great Britain at the present time. 
There is no essential reason whatever why food and 
fuel in Great Britain should be considerably dearer 
than they are under peace conditions. Just the 
same home areas are under cultivation, just the 
same foreign resources are available; indeed, more 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 101 

foreign supplies are available because we have inter- 
cepted those that under normal conditions would 
have gone to Germany. The submarine blockade 
of Britain is now a negligible factor in this question. 
Despite these patent conditions there has been, 
and is, a steady increase in the cost of provisions, 
coal, and every sort of necessity. This increase 
means an increase in the cost of production of many 
commodities, and so contributes again to the gen- 
eral scarcity. This is the domestic aspect of a diffi- 
culty that has also its military side. It is not suffi- 
cient merely to make munitions ; they must also be 
delivered. Great Britain is suffering very seri- 
ously from congestion of the railways. She suffers 
both in social and military efficiency, and she is so 
suffering because her railways, instead of being 
planned as one great and simple national distribut- 
ing system, have grown up under conditions of 
clumsy, dividend-seeking competition. Each great 
company and combination has worked its own 
areas, and made difficulties and aggressions at the 
boundaries of its sphere of influence; here are in- 
convenient junctions and here unnecessary du- 
plications; nearly all the companies come into 
London, each taking up its own area of expensive 
land for goods yards, sidings, shunting grounds, and 



102 WHAT IS COMING? 

each regardless of any proper correlation with the 
other ; great areas of the County of London are cov- 
ered with their idle trucks and their separate coal 
stores ; in many provincial towns you will find two 
or even three railway stations at opposite ends of 
the town; the streets are blocked by the vans and 
trolleys of the several companies tediously handing 
about goods that could be dealt with at a tenth of 
the cost in time and labour at a central clearing- 
house, did such a thing exist ; and each system has 
its vast separate staff, unaccustomed to work with 
any other staff. Since the war began the Govern- 
ment has taken over the general direction of this 
disarticulated machinery, but no one with eyes who 
travels about England now can fail to remark, in 
the miles and miles of waiting loaded trucks on 
every siding, the evidences of mischievous and now 
almost insuperable congestion. The trucks of each 
system that have travelled on to another, still go 
back for the most part empty to their own; and 
thousands of privately owned trucks which carry 
cargo only one way, block our sidings. Great Brit- 
ain wastes men and time to a disastrous extent in 
these needless shuntings and handlings. 

Here, touching every life in the community, is 
one instance of the muddle that arises naturally out 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 103 

of the individualistic method of letting public serv- 
ices grow up anyhow without a plan, or without any 
direction at all except the research for private 
profit. 

A second series of deficiencies that the war has 
brought to light in the too individualistic Brit- 
ish State is the entire want of connection between 
private profit and public welfare. So far as the 
interests of the capitalist go it does not matter 
whether he invests his money at home or abroad; 
it does not matter whether his goods are manufac- 
tured in London or Timbuctoo. 

But what of the result? At the outbreak of the 
war Great Britain found that a score of necessary 
industries had drifted out of the country, because 
it did not " pay " any private person to keep them 
here. The shortage of dyes has been amply dis- 
cussed as a typical case. A much graver one that 
we may now write about was the shortage of 
zinc. Within a month or so of the outbreak of 
the war the British Government had to take urgent 
and energetic steps to secure this essential ingredi- 
ent of cartridge cases. Individualism had let zinc 
refining drift to Belgium and Germany ; it was the 
luck rather than the merit of Great Britain that 
one or two refineries still existed. And still more 



104 WHAT IS COMING? 

extraordinary things came to light in the matter 
of the metal supply. Under an individualistic sys- 
tem you may sell to the highest bidder, and any one 
with money from anywhere may come in and buy. 
Great supplies of colonial ores were found to be 
cornered by semi-national German syndicates. 
Supplies were held up by these contracts against 
the necessities of the Empire. And this was but 
one instance of many which have shown that, while 
industrial development in the Allied countries is 
still largely a squabbling confusion of little short- 
sighted, unscientific, private profit-seeking owners, 
in Germany it has been for some years increasingly 
run on far-seeing collectivist lines. Against the 
comparatively little and mutually jealous British 
or American capitalists and millionaires, Germany 
pits itself as a single great capitalist and competi- 
tor. She has worked everywhere upon a compre- 
hensive plan. Against her great national electric 
combination, for example, only another national 
combination could stand. As it was, Germany — 
in the way of business — wired and lit ( and exam- 
ined) the forts at Liege. She bought and prepared 
a hundred strategic centres in individualistic Bel- 
gium and France. 

So we pass from the fact that individualism is 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 105 

hopeless muddle to the fact that the individualist 
idea is one of limitless venality. Who can buy, 
may control. And Germany, in her long scheming 
against her individualist rivals, has not simply set 
herself to buy and hold the keys and axles of their 
economic machinery. She has set herself, it must 
be admitted, with a certain crudity and little suc- 
cess, but with unexampled vigour, to buy the minds 
of her adversaries. The Western nations have 
taken a peculiar pride in having a free Press ; that 
is to say, a Press that may be bought by any one. 
Our Press is constantly bought and sold, in gross 
and detail, by financiers, advertisers, political par- 
ties, and the like. Germany came into the market 
rather noisily, and great papers do to a large ex- 
tent live in glass houses ; but her efforts have been 
sufficient to exercise the minds of great numbers 
of men with the problem of what might have hap- 
pened in the way of national confusion if the Ger- 
man attack had been more subtly conceived. . . . 
It is only a partial answer to this difficulty to 
say that a country that is so nationalist and aggres- 
sive as Germany is incapable of subtle conceptions. 
The fact remains that in Great Britain at the pres- 
ent time there are newspaper proprietors who would 
be good bargains for Germany at two million 



106 WHAT IS COMING? 

pounds a head, and that there was no effectual 
guarantee in the individualistic system, but only 
our good luck and the natural patriotism of the 
individuals concerned that she did not pick up these 
bargains before trading with the enemy became 
illegal. It happened, for example, that Lord 
Northcliffe was public-spirited. That was the good 
luck of Great Britain rather than her merit. There 
was nothing in the individualistic system to pre- 
vent Germany from buying up the entire Harms- 
worth Press — The Times, Daily Mail, and all — 
five years before the war, and using it to confuse 
the national mind, destroy the national unity, sacri- 
fice the national interests, and frustrate the na- 
tional will. Not only the newspapers, but the 
newsagents and booksellers of both Great Britain 
and America are entirely at the disposal of any 
hostile power which chooses to buy them up quietly 
and systematically. It is merely a question of 
wealth and cleverness. And if the failure of the 
Germans to grip the press of the French and Eng- 
lish speaking countries has been conspicuous, she 
has been by no means so unsuccessful in — for ex- 
ample — Spain. At the present time the thought 
and feeling of the Spanish speaking world is being 
educated against the Allies. The Spanish mind 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 107 

has been sold by its custodians into German control. 

Muddle and venality do not, however, exhaust 
the demonstrated vices of individualism. Individ- 
ualism encourages desertion and treason. Individ- 
ualism permits base private people to abscond with 
the national resources and squeeze a profit out of 
national suffering. In the early stages of the war 
some bright minds conceived the idea of a corner in 
drugs. It is not illegal ; it is quite the sort of thing 
that appeals to the individualistic frame of mind 
as entirely meritorious. As the New Statesman 
put it recently : " The happy owners of the world's 
available stock of a few indispensable drugs did not 
refrain from making, not only the various Govern- 
ments, but also all the sick people of the world pay 
double, and even tenfold, prices for what was es- 
sential to relieve pain and save life. What for- 
tunes were thus made we shall probably never 
know, any more than we shall know the tale of the 
men and women and children who suffered and died 
because of their inability to pay, not the cost of 
production of what would have saved them, but the 
unnecessarily enhanced price that the chances of 
the market enabled the owners to exact." 

And another bright instance of the value of in- 
dividualism is the selling of British shipping to 



108 WHAT IS COMING? 

neutral buyers just when the country is in the most 
urgent need of every ship it can get, and the de- 
liberate transfer to America of a number of British 
businesses to evade paying a proper share of the na- 
tional bill in taxation. The English who have gone 
to America at different times have been of very 
different qualities; at the head of the list are the 
English who went over in the Mayflower ; at the 
bottom will be rich accessions of this war. . . . And 
perhaps a still more impressive testimony to the 
rottenness of these " business men,- ' upon whom 
certain eccentric voices call so amazingly to come 
and govern us, is the incurable distrust they have 
sown in the minds of labour. Never was an at- 
mosphere of discipline more lamentable than that 
which has grown up in the factories, workshops, 
and great privately owned public services of Amer- 
ica and Western Europe. The men, it is evident, 
expect to be robbed and cheated at every turn. I 
can only explain their state of mind by supposing 
that they have been robbed and cheated. Their 
scorn and contempt for their employers' good faith 
is limitless. Their morale is undermined by an 
invincible distrust. It is no good for Mr. Lloyd 
George to attempt to cure the gathered ill of a cen- 
tury with half an hour or so of eloquence. When 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 109 

Great Britain, in her supreme need, turns to the 
workmen she has trained in the ways of individual- 
ism for a century, she reaps the harvest individual- 
ism she has sown. She has to fight with that handi- 
cap. Every regulation for the rapid mobilisation 
of labour is scrutinised to find the trick in it. 

And they find the trick in it as often as not. 
Smart individualistic " business experience " has 
been at the draughtsman's elbow. A man in an in- 
dividualistic system does not escape from class 
ideas and prejudices by becoming an official. 
There is profound and bitter wisdom in the deep 
distrust felt by British labour for both military and 
industrial conscription. 

The breakdown of individualism has been so com- 
plete in Great Britain that we are confronted with 
the spectacle of this great and ancient kingdom 
reconstructing itself perforce, while it wages the 
greatest war in history. A temporary nationalisa- 
tion of land transit has been improvised, and only 
the vast, deep-rooted, political influence of the ship- 
owners and coalowners has staved off the mani- 
festly necessary step of nationalising shipping and 
coal. I doubt if they will be able to stave it off to 
the end of the long struggle which is still before us 
if the militarism of Germany is really to be ar- 



110 WHAT IS COMING? 

rested and discredited. Expropriation and not 
conscription will be the supreme test of Britain's 
loyalty to her Allies. The British shipowners, in 
particular, are reaping enormous but precarious 
profits from the war. The blockade of Britain by 
the British shipowners is scarcely less effective than 
the blockade of Germany by Britain. With an urg- 
ent need of every ship for the national supplies, 
British ships at the present moment of writing this, 
are still carrying cheap American automobiles to 
Australia. They would carry munitions to Ger- 
many if their owners thought they had a sporting 
chance of not getting caught at it. These British 
shipowners are a pampered class with great politi- 
cal and social influence, and no doubt as soon as 
the accumulating strain of the struggle tells to the 
extent of any serious restriction of their advantage 
and prospects, we shall see them shifting to the side 
of the at present negligible group of British pacif- 
ists. I do not think one can count on any limit to 
their selfishness and treason. I believe that the 
calculations of some of these extreme and appar- 
ently quite unreasonable " pacifists " are right. 
Before the war is over there will be a lot of money 
in the pacifist business. The rich curs of the West 
End will join hands with the labour curs of the 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 111 

Clyde. The base are to be found in all classes, but I 
doubt if they dominate any. But I do not believe 
that any interest or group of interests in Great 
Britain can stand in the way of the will of the 
whole people to bring this struggle to a triumphant 
finish at any cost. I do not believe that the most 
sacred ties of personal friendship and blood rela- 
tionship with influential people can save either 
shipowners or coalowners or army contractors to 
the end. There will be no end until these profit- 
makings are arrested. The necessary " conscrip- 
tions of property " must come about in Great Brit- 
ain because there is no alternative but failure in 
the war, and the British people will not stand fail- 
ure. I believe that the end of the war will see, not 
only transit, but shipping, collieries, and large por- 
tions of the machinery of food and drink produc- 
tion and distribution no longer under the adminis- 
tration of private ownership, but under a sort of 
provisional public administration. And a very 
large part of the British factories will be in the 
same case. Two years ago no one would have dared 
to prophesy the tremendous rearrangement of 
manufacturing machinery which is in progress in 
Britain to-day. Thousands of firms of engineers 
and manufacturers of all sorts, which were flourish- 



112 WHAT IS COMING? 

ing in 1914, exist to-day only as names, as shapes, as 
empty shells. Their staffs have been shattered, 
scattered, reconstructed; their buildings enlarged 
and modified; their machinery exchanged, recon- 
stituted, or taken. The reality is a vast interde- 
pendent national factory that would have seemed 
incredible to Fouriei . 

It will be as impossible to put back British in- 
dustrialism into the factories and forms of the pre- 
war era as it would be to restore the Carthaginian 
Empire. There is a new economic Great Britain 
to-day, emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a 
gawky, weedy giant, but a giant who may fill out to 
such dimensions as the German national system has 
never attained. Behind it is an idea, a new idea, 
the idea of the nation as one great economic system 
working together, an idea which could not possibly 
have got into the sluggish and conservative British 
intelligence in half a century by any other means 
than the stark necessities of this war. . . . Great 
Britain cannot retrace those steps even if she 
would, and so she will be forced to carry this proc- 
ess of reconstruction through. And what is hap- 
pening to Great Britain must, with its national dif- 
ferences, be happening to France and Russia. Not 
only for war ends, but for peace ends, behind the 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 113 

front and sustaining the front, individualities are 
being hammered together into common and con- 
certed activities. 

At the end of this war Great Britain will find her- 
self with this great national factory, this great na- 
tional organisation of labour, planned, indeed, pri- 
marily to make war material, but convertible 
with the utmost ease to the purposes of automobile 
manufacture, to transit reconstruction, to electrical 
engineering, and endless such uses. France and 
Eussia will be in a parallel case. All the world 
will be exhausted, and none of the Allies will have 
much money to import automobiles, railway ma- 
terial, electrical gear, and so on, from abroad. 
Moreover, it will be a matter'of imperative necessity 
for them to get ahead of the Central Powers with 
their productive activities. We shall all be too 
poor to import from America, and we shall be in- 
sane to import from Germany. America will be 
the continent with the long purse, prepared to buy 
rather than sell. Each country will have great 
masses of soldiers waiting to return to industrial 
life, and will therefore be extremely indisposed 
to break up any existing productive organisation. 
In the face of these facts, will any of the Allied 
Powers be so foolish as to disband this great system 



114 WHAT IS COMING? 

of national factories and nationally worked com- 
munications? Moreover, we have already risked 
the prophecy that this war will not end with such 
conclusiveness as to justify an immediate beating 
out of our swords into ploughshares. There will 
be a military as well as a social reason for keeping 
the national factories in a going state. What more 
obvious course, then, than to keep them going by 
turning them on to manufacture goods of urgent 
public necessity? There are a number of modern 
commodities now practically standardised: the 
bicycle, the cheap watch, the ordinary tradesman's 
delivery automobile, the farmer's runabout, the 
country doctor's car, much electric lighting ma- 
terial, dynamos, and so forth. And also, in a 
parallel case, there is shipbuilding. The chemical 
side of munition work can turn itself with no ex- 
treme difficulty to the making of such products as 
dyes. 

We face the fact, then, that either the State must 
go on with this production, as it can do, straight 
off from the signing of peace, converting with a 
minimum of friction, taking on its soldiers as they 
are discharged from the army as employes with a 
minimum waste of time and a minimum of social 
disorder and a maximum advantage in the resump- 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 115 

tion of foreign trade, or there will be a dangerous 
break-up of the national factory system, a time of 
extreme chaos and bitter unemployment until cap- 
ital accumulates for new developments. The risks 
of social convulsion will be enormous. And there 
is small hope that the Central Powers, and par- 
ticularly industrial Germany, will have the polite- 
ness to wait through the ten or twelve years of 
economic embarrassment that a refusal to take this 
bold step into scientific Socialism will entail. 

But the prophet must be on his guard against 
supposing that, because a thing is highly desirable, 
it must necessarily happen; or that, because it is 
highly dangerous, it will be avoided. This bold 
and successful economic reconstruction upon na- 
tional lines is not inevitable merely because every 
sound reason points us in that direction. A man 
may be very ill, a certain drug may be clearly in- 
dicated as the only possible remedy, but it does not 
follow that the drug is available, that the doctor 
will have the sense to prescribe it, or the patient 
the means to procure it or the intelligence to swal- 
low it. The experience of history is that nations 
do not take the obviously right course, but the obvi- 
ously wrong one. The present prophet knows only 
his England, but, so far as England is concerned, 



116 WHAT IS COMING? 

he can cover a sheet of paper with scarcely a pause, 
jotting down memoranda of numberless forces that 
make against any such rational reconstruction. 
Most of these forces, in greater or less proportion, 
must be present in the case of every other country 
under consideration. 

The darkest shadow upon the outlook of Euro- 
pean civilisation at the present time is not the war ; 
it is the failure of any co-operative spirit between 
labour and the directing classes. The educated and 
leisured classes have been rotten with individual- 
ism for a century; they have destroyed the con- 
fidence of the worker in any leadership whatever. 
Labour stands apart, intractable. If there is to be 
any such rapid conversion of the economic machin- 
ery as the opportunities and necessities of this great 
time demand, then labour must be taken into the 
confidence of those who would carry it through. It 
must be reassured and enlightened. Labour must 
know clearly what is being done ; it must be an as- 
senting co-operator. The stride to economic na- 
tional service and Socialism is a stride that labour 
should be more eager to take than any other section 
of the community. And the first step in reassuring 
labour must be to bring the greedy private owner 
and the speculator under a far more drastic dis- 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 117 

cipline than at present. The property-owning class 
is continually accusing labour of being ignorant, 
suspicious and difficult ; it is blind to the fact that 
it is itself profit-seeking by habit, greedy, conceited, 
and half educated. Every step in the mobilisation 
of Great Britain's vast resources for the purposes of 
the war has been hampered by the tricks, the fail- 
ures to understand, and the almost instinctive dis- 
loyalties of private owners. The raising of rents 
in Glasgow drove the infuriated workmen of the 
Clyde district into an unwilling strike. It was an 
exasperating piece of private selfishness, quite typ- 
ical of the individualistic state of mind, and the 
failure to anticipate or arrest it on the part of the 
Government was a worse failure than Suvla Bay. 
And everywhere the officials of the Ministry of 
Munitions find private employers holding back 
workers and machinery from munition works, in- 
triguing — more particularly through the Board of 
Trade — to have all sorts of manufactures for 
private profit recognised as munition work, or if 
that contention is too utterly absurd, then as work 
vitally necessary to the maintenance of British ex- 
port trade and the financial position of the country. 
It is an undeniable fact that employers and men 
alike have been found far readier to risk their lives 



118 WHAT IS COMING? 

for their country than to lay aside any scale of 
profits to which they have grown accustomed. 

This conflict of individualistic enterprise and 
class suspicion against the synthesis of the public 
welfare is not peculiar to Great Britain ; it is prob- 
ably going on with local variations in Germany, 
Russia, Italy, France, and, indeed, in every com- 
batant country. Because of the individualistic 
forces and feelings, none of us, either friends or 
enemies, are really getting anything like our full 
possible result out of our national efforts. But in 
Germany there is a greater tradition of subordina- 
tion; in France there is a greater clarity of mind 
than in any other country. Great Britain and 
Russia in this, as in so many other matters, are at 
once close kindred and sharp antithesis. Each is 
mentally crippled by the corruption of its educa- 
tional system by an official religious orthodoxy, 
and hampered by a Court which disowns any func- 
tion of intellectual stimulus. Neither possesses a 
scientifically educated class to which it can look 
for the powerful handling of this great occasion, 
and each has acquired under these disadvantages 
the same strange faculty for producing sane result- 
ants out of illogical confusions. It is the way of 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 119 

these unmethodical Powers to produce unexpected, 
vaguely formulated, and yet effective cerebral ac- 
tion — apparently from their backbones. As I sit 
playing at prophecy, and turn over the multitudin- 
ous impressions of the last year in my mind, weigh- 
ing the great necessities of the time against ob- 
stacles and petty-mindedness, I become more and 
more conscious of a third factor that is neither 
need nor obstruction, and that is the will to get 
things right that has been liberated by the war. 
The new spirit is still but poorly expressed, but 
it will find expression. The war goes on, and we 
discuss this question of economic reconstruction 
as though it was an issue that lay between the 
labour that has stayed behind and the business men, 
for the most part old men with old habits of mind, 
who have stayed behind. The real life of Europe's 
future lies on neither side of that opposition. The 
real life is mutely busy at present, saying little 
because of the uproar of the guns, and not so much 
learning as casting habits and shedding delusions. 
In the trenches there are workers who have broken 
with the old slacking and sabotage, and there are 
prospective leaders who have forgotten profit. The 
men between eighteen and forty are far too busy in 



120 WHAT IS COMING? 

the blood and mud to make much showing now; 
but to-morrow these men will be the nation. 

When that third factor of the problem is brought 
in the outlook of the horoscope improves. The 
spirit of the war may be counted upon to balance 
and prevail against this spirit of individualism, 
this spirit of suspicion and disloyalty, which I fear 
more than anything else in the world. I believe in 
the young France, young England and young 
Russia this war is making, and so I believe that 
every European country will struggle along the 
path that this war has opened to a far more com- 
pletely organised State than has existed ever be- 
fore. The Allies will become State firms, as Ger- 
many was, indeed, already becoming before the 
war ; setting private profit aside in the common in- 
terest, handling agriculture, transport, shipping, 
coal, the supply of metals, the manufacture of a 
thousand staple articles, as national concerns. 
And in the face of the manifest determination of 
the Central Powers to do as much, the Allies will 
be forced also to link their various State firms to- 
gether into a great allied trust, trading with a com- 
mon interest and a common plan with Germany and 
America and the rest of the world. . . . Youth and 
necessity will carry this against selfishness, against 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 121 

the unimaginative, against the unteachable, the sus- 
picious, the " old fool" 

But I do not venture to prophesy that this will 
come about as if it were a slick and easy deduction 
from present circumstances. Even in France I do 
not think things will move as lucidly and gener- 
ously as that. There will be a conflict everywhere 
between wisdom and cunning, between the eyes 
of youth and the purblind, between energy and 
obstinacy. The reorganisation of the European 
States will come about clumsily and ungraciously. 
At every point the sticker will be found sticking 
tight, holding out to be bought off, holding out for a 
rent or a dividend or a share, holding out by mere 
instinct. At every turn, too, the bawler will be 
loud and active, bawling suspicions, bawling ac- 
cusations, bawling panic, or just simply bawling. 
Tricks, peculation, obstinacies, vanities — after this 
war men will still be men. But I do believe that 
through all the dust and din, the great reasons in 
the case, the steady constructive forces of the situa- 
tion, will carry us. I believe that out of the ruins 
of the nineteenth century system of private capital- 
ism that this war has smashed for ever, there will 
arise, there does even now arise, in this strange 
scaffolding of national munition factories and 



122 WHAT IS COMING? 

hastily nationalised public services, the framework 
of a new economic and social order based upon na- 
tional ownership and national service. 

Let us now recapitulate a little and see how far 
we have got in constructing a picture of the Euro- 
pean community as it will be in fifteen or twenty 
years' time. Nominally it will be little more of a 
Socialist State than it is to-day, but, as a matter of 
fact, the ships, the railways, the coal and metal 
supply, the great metal industries, much engineer- 
ing, and most agriculture, will be more or less com- 
pletely under collective ownership, and certainly 
very completely under collective control. This 
does not mean that there will have been any disap- 
pearance of private property, but only that there 
will have been a very considerable change in its 
character ; the owner will be less of controller but 
more of a creditor; he will be a rentier or an an- 
nuitant. The burthen of this class upon the com- 
munity will not be relatively quite so heavy as it 
would otherwise have been, because of a very con- 
siderable rise in wages and prices. In a commun- 
ity in which all the great initiatives have been as- 
sumed by the State, the importance of financiers 
and promoters will have diminished relatively to 
the importance of administrative officials; the op- 



EUROPE AND SOCIALISM 123 

portunities of private exploitation, indeed, will have 
so diminished that there will probably be far less 
evidence of great concentrations of private wealth 
in the European social landscape than there was 
before the war. On the other hand, there will be 
an enormously increased rentier class drawing the 
interest of the war loans from the community, and 
maintaining a generally high standard of comfort. 
There will have been a great demand for adminis- 
trative and technical abilities and a great stimula- 
tion of scientific and technical education. By 1926 
we shall be going about a world that will have re- 
covered very largely from the impoverishment of 
the struggle; we shall tour in State-manufactured 
automobiles upon excellent roads, and we shall live 
in houses equipped with a national factory electric 
light installation, and at every turn we shall be 
using and consuming the products of nationalised 
industry — and paying off the National Debt at the 
same time, and reducing our burden of rentiers. 
Our boys will be studying science in their schools 
more thoroughly than they do now, and they will 
in many cases be learning Russian instead of Greek 
or German. More of our boys will be going into the 
public service, and fewer thinking of private busi- 
ness, and they will be going into the public service, 



124 WHAT IS COMING? 

not as clerks, but as engineers, technical chemists, 
manufacturers, State agriculturists, and the like. 
The public service will be less a service of clerks and 
more a service of practical men. The ties that 
bind France and Great Britain at the present mo- 
ment will have been drawn very much closer. 
France, Belgium, and England will be drifting 
towards a French-English bi-lingualism. . . . 

So much of our picture we may splash in now. 
Much that is quite essential remains to be dis- 
cussed. So far we have said scarcely a word about 
the prospects of party politics and the problems of 
government that arise as the State ceases to be a 
mere impartial adjudicator between private in- 
dividuals, and takes upon itself more and more of 
the direction of the general life of the community. 



VI 

LAWYER AND PRESS 

The riddle of administration is the most subtle of 
all those that the would-be prophet of the things 
that are coming must attempt. We see the great 
modern States confronted now by vast and urgent 
necessities, by opportunities that may never recur. 
Individualism has achieved its inevitable failure; 
" go as you please " in a world that also contained 
aggressive militarism, has broken down. We live 
in a world of improvised State factories, com- 
mandeered railways, substituted labour, and emerg- 
ency arrangements. Our vague-minded, lax, mod- 
ern democracy has to pull itself together, has to 
take over and administer and succeed with a great 
system of collective functions, has to express its 
collective will in some better terms than " go as you 
please," or fail. 

And we find the affairs of nearly every great 
democratic State in the hands of a class of men 
not specially adapted to any such constructive or 
administrative work. 

125 



126 WHAT IS COMING? 

I am writing here now chiefly of the Western Al- 
lies. Russia is peculiar in having her administra- 
tive machine much more highly developed in rela- 
tion to her general national life than the free demo- 
cratic countries. She has to make a bureaucracy 
that has not hitherto been an example for efficiency, 
into a bureaucracy that will be constructive, re- 
sponsive, liberal, scientific and efficient; the west- 
ern countries have to do the same with that 
oligarchy of politicians which, as Professor Michels 
has recently pointed out in his striking book on 
Political Parties, is the necessary reality of 
democratic government. By different methods the 
Eastern and Western Powers have to attain a com- 
mon end. Both bureaucracy and pseudo-demo- 
cratic oligarchy have to accomplish an identical 
task, to cement the pacific alliance of the Pledged 
Allies and to socialise their common industrial and 
economic life, so as to make it invulnerable to for- 
eign attack. 

Now in Great Britain, which is the democracy 
that has been most under the close observation of 
the present prophet, there is at present a great out- 
cry against the " politician," and more particularly 
against the "lawyer-politician." He is our em- 
barrassment. In him we personify all our difficul- 



LAWYER AND PRESS 127 

ties. Let us consider the charges against this in- 
dividual. Let us ask, can we do without him? 
And let us further see what chances there may be 
of so altering, qualifying, or balancing him as to 
minimise the evil of his influence. To begin with, 
let us run over the essentials of the charge against 
him. 

It is with a modest blush that the present prophet 
recapitulates these charges. So early as the year 
1902 he was lifting up his voice, not exactly in the 
wilderness, but at least in the Royal Institution, 
against the legal as compared with the creative or 
futurist type of mind. The legal mind, he insisted, 
looks necessarily to the past. It is dilatory be- 
cause it has no sense of coming things, it is unin- 
ventive and wasteful, it does not create, it takes ad- 
vantage. It is the type of mind least able, under 
any circumstances, to organise great businesses, to 
plan campaigns, to adventure or achieve. " Wait 
and see " crystallises its spirit. Its resistance is 
admirable, and it has no " go." Nevertheless there 
is a tendency for power to gravitate in all demo- 
cratic countries to the lawyer. 

In the British system the normal faults of the 
lawyer are enhanced, and his predominance intensi- 
fied, by certain peculiarities of our system. In the 



128 WHAT IS COMING? 

first place he belongs to a guild of exceptional 
power. In Britain it happens that the unfortu- 
nate course was taken ages ago, of bribing the whole 
legal profession to be honest. The British judges 
and law officers are stupendously overpaid in or- 
der to make them incorruptible; it is a poor but 
perhaps a well-merited compliment to their profes- 
sional code. We have squared the whole profession 
to be individually unbribable. The judges, more- 
over, in the Anglo-Saxon communities are ap- 
pointed from among the leading barristers, an ar- 
rangement that a child can see is demoralising and 
inadvisable. And in Great Britain all the greatest 
salaries in the Government service are reserved for 
the legal profession. The greatest prizes, therefore, 
before an energetic young man who has to make his 
way in Great Britain are the legal prizes, and his 
line of advancement to these lies, for all the best 
years of his life, not through the public service, but 
through the private practice of advocacy. The 
higher education, such as it is, in Great Britain, 
produces under the stimulus of these conditions, 
an advocate as its finest flower. To go from the 
posing and chatter of the Union Debating Society 
to a university laboratory is, in Britain, to renounce 
ambition. Few men of exceptional energy will do 



LAWYER AND PRESS 129 

that. The national consequences of this state of 
affairs have been only too manifest throughout the 
conduct of the war. The British Government has 
developed all the strength and all the weakness of 
the great profession it represents. It has been un- 
inventive, dilatory, and without initiative; it has 
been wasteful and evasive ; but it has not been want- 
ing in a certain eloquence and dignity, it has been 
wary and shrewd, and it has held on to office with 
the concentrated skill and determination of a sucker 
fish. And the British mind, with a concentration 
and intensity unprecedented before the war, is 
speculating how it can contrive to get a different 
sort of ruler and administrator at work upon its 
affairs. 

There is a disposition in the Press and much of 
the private talk one hears to get rid of lawyers from 
the control of national affairs altogether, to sub- 
stitute " business men " or scientific men or " ex- 
perts." That way lies dictatorship and Csesarism. 
And even Great Britain is not so heedless of the 
experiences of other nations as to attempt again 
what has already been so abundantly worked out in 
national disaster across the Channel. The essen- 
tial business of government is to deal between man 
and man ; it is not to manage the national affairs in 



130 WHAT IS COMING? 

detail, but to secure the proper managers, investiga- 
tors, administrators, generals, and so forth, to 
maintain their efficiency, and keep the balance be- 
tween them. We cannot do without a special class 
of men for these interventions and controls. In 
other words, we cannot do without a special class 
of politicians. They may be elected by a public, 
or appointed by an autocrat; at some point they 
have to come in. And this business of intervening 
between men and classes and departments in public 
life, and getting them to work together, is so closely 
akin to the proper work of a lawyer in dealing be- 
tween men and men, that unless the latter are ab- 
solutely barred from becoming the former, it is al- 
most unavoidable that politicians should be drawn 
more abundantly from the lawyer class than from 
any other class in the community. 

This is so much the case that when the London 
Times turns in despair from a Government of 
lawyers and looks about for an alternative, the first 
figure that presents itself is that distinguished ad- 
vocate — Sir Edward Carson ! 

But there is a difference between recognising 
that some sort of lawyer-politician is unavoidable 
and agreeing that the existing type of lawyer who 
is so largely accountable for the massive slowness, 



LAWYER AND PRESS 131 

the confused action, the slovenliness rather than 
the weakness of purpose, shown by Great Britain 
in this war, is the only possible type. The British 
system of education and legal organisation is not 
the last word of human wisdom in these matters. 

The real case we British have against our 
lawyers, if I may adopt an expressive colloquialism, 
is not that they are lawyers but that they are such 
infernal lawyers. They trail into modern life most 
of the faults of a mediaeval guild. They seem to 
have no sense of the state they could develop, no 
sense of the future they might control. Their law 
and procedure has never been remodelled upon the 
framework of modern ideas; their minds are still 
set to the tune of mediaeval bickerings, traditional- 
ism, and state blindness. They are mystery deal- 
ers, almost unanimously they have resisted giving 
the common man the protection of a code. In 
Great Britain we have had no Napoleon to override 
the profession. It is extraordinary how complete 
has been their preservation of barbaric conceptions. 
Even the doctor is now largely emancipated from 
his archaic limitations as a skilled retainer. He 
thinks more and more of the public health, and less 
and less of his patron. The more recent a profes- 
sion the less there is of the individualistic personal 



132 WHAT IS COMING? 

reference ; scientific research, for example, disavows 
and forbids every personal reference. But while 
every one would be shocked at some great doctor, or 
some great research institution, in these days of 
urgent necessity spending two or three weeks on 
the minor ailments of some rich person's lap-dog, 
nobody is scandalised at the spectacle of Sir Ed- 
ward Carson and a costly law court spending long 
days upon the sordid disputes that centre upon 
young Master Slingsby's ear — whether it is the 
Slingsby family ear, or the ear of a supposititious 
child — a question that any three old women might 
be trusted to settle. After that he rests for a fort- 
night and recuperates and returns — to take up a 
will case turning upon the toy rabbits and suchlike 
trifles which entertained the declining years of a 
nonagenarian. This, when we are assured that 
the country awaits Sir Edward as its Deliverer. 
It is as if Lord Kitchener took a month off to act at 
specially high rates for the " movies." Our stand- 
ard for the lawyer is older and lower than it is for 
other men. 

There is no more reason nowadays why a lawyer 
should look to advocacy as a proper use of his 
knowledge than that a doctor should make private 
poisoning the lucrative side of his profession. 



LAWYER AND PRESS 133 

There is no reason why a court of law should ig- 
nore the plain right of the common weal to inter- 
vene in every case between man and man. There is 
every reason why trivial disputes about wills and 
legitimacy should not be wasting our national re- 
sources at the present time, when nearly every other 
form of waste is being restrained. The sound case 
against the legal profession in Anglo-Saxon coun- 
tries is not that it is unnecessary, but that it is al- 
most incredibly antiquated, almost incredibly care- 
less of the public well-being, and that it corrupts 
or dwarfs all the men who enter it. Our urgent 
need is not so much to get rid of the lawyer from 
our affairs as to get rid of the wig and gown 
spirit and of the special pleader, and to find and 
develop the new lawyer, the lawyer who is not an 
advocate, who is not afraid of a code, who has had 
some scientific education, and whose imagination 
has been quickened by the realisation of life as crea- 
tive opportunity. We want to emancipate this pro- 
fession from its ancient guild restrictions — the 
most anti-social and disastrous of all such restric- 
tions — to destroy its disgraceful traditions of 
over-payment and fee-snatching, to insist upon a 
scientific, philosophical training for its practition- 
ers, to make the practice of advocacy a fall from 



134 WHAT IS COMING? 

grace, and to bar professional advocates from the 
bench. In the Britsh trenches now there must be 
many hundreds of fine young lawyers, still but little 
corrupted, who would be only too glad to exchange 
the sordid vulgarities and essential dishonour of a 
successful lawyer's career under the old conditions 
for lives of service and statescraft. . . . 

No observer of the general trend of events in Eu- 
rope will get any real grasp of what is happening 
until he realises the cardinal importance of the re- 
actions that centre upon this question. The cur- 
rent development of political institutions, and the 
possible development of a new spirit and method 
in the legal profession, are so intimately interwoven 
as to be practically one and the same question. The 
international question is, can we get a new Ger- 
many? The national question everywhere is, can 
we get a better politician? 

The widely prevalent discontent with the part 
played by the lawyer in the affairs of all the West- 
ern Allies is certain to develop into a vigorous agi- 
tation for legal reconstruction. In the case of 
every other great trade union, the war has exacted 
profound and vital concessions. The British work- 
ing men, for example, have abandoned scores of 
protective restrictions upon women's labour, upon 



LAWYER AND PRESS 135 

unskilled labour, for which they have fought for 
generations ; they have submitted to a virtual serf- 
dom, that the nation's needs might be supplied ; the 
medical profession has sent almost too large a pro- 
portion of its members to the front; the scientific 
men, the writers, have been begging to be used in 
any capacity at any price or none ; the Ministry of 
Munitions is full of unpaid workers, and so on. It 
is the British legal profession and trade union alone 
that has made no sign of any disposition to relax its 
elaborate restrictions upon the labour of amateurs 
and women, or to abate one jot or one tittle of its 
habitual rewards. There has been no attempt to 
reduce the costly law officers of the Government, 
for example, or to call in the help of older men or 
women to release law officers who, like Sir John 
Simon and Sir F. E. Smith, are of military experi- 
ence or age. 

And I must admit that there are small signs of 
the advent of the " new lawyer," at whose possibil- 
ity I have just flung a hopeful glance, to replace the 
existing mass of mediaeval unsoundness. Barris- 
ters seem to age prematurely — at least in Great 
Britain — unless they are born old. In the legal 
profession one hears nothing of " the young " ; one 
hears only of " smart juniors." Reform and pro- 



136 WHAT IS COMING? 

gressive criticism in the legal profession, unlike all 
other professions, seem to be the monopoly of the 
retired. 

Nevertheless, Great Britain is as yet only be- 
ginning to feel the real stresses of the war; she is 
coming into the full strain a year behind France, 
Germany, and Russia ; and after the war there lies 
the possibility of still more violent stresses ; so that 
what is as yet a mere cloud of criticism and resent- 
ment at our lawyer-politicians and privileged legal 
profession may gather to a great storm before 1918 
or 1919. I am inclined to foretell as one most 
highly probable development of the present vague 
but very considerable revolt against the lawyer in 
British public life, first some clumsy proposals, or 
even attempts, to leave him out and use " business 
men/' soldiers, admirals, dictators, or men of 
science, in his place — which is rather like throwing 
away a blottesque fountain pen and trying to write 
with a walking-stick or a revolver or a flash-light — 
and then, when that is found to be impossible, a 
resolute attempt to clean and reconstitute the legal 
profession on modern and more honourable lines; 
a movement into which quite possibly a number of 
the younger British lawyers, so soon as they realise 
that the movement is good enough to risk careers 



LAWYER AND PRESS 137 

upon, may throw themselves. A large share in such 
a reform movement, if it occurs, will be brought 
about by the Press ; by which I mean not simply the 
periodical Press, but all books and contemporary 
discussion. It is only by the natural playing off of 
Press against lawyer-politician that democratic 
States can ever come to their own. 

And that brings me to the second part of this 
question, which is whether, quite apart from the 
possible reform and spiritual rebirth of the legal 
profession, there is not also the possibility of bal- 
ancing and correcting its influence. In ancient 
Hebrew history — it may be a warning rather than 
a precedent — there were two great forces, one 
formal, conservative and corrupting, the other un- 
disciplined, creative and destructive; the first was 
the priest, the second the prophet. Their interac- 
tion is being extraordinarily paralleled in the 
Anglo-Saxon democracies by the interaction of 
lawyer-politician and Press to-day. If the lawyer- 
politician is unavoidable, the Press is indispensable. 
It is not in the clash and manoeuvres and mutual 
correction of party, but in the essential conflict of 
political authority on the one hand and Press on the 
other that the future of democratic government ap- 
parently lies. In the clearer, simpler case of 



138 WHAT IS COMING? 

France, a less wealthy and finer type of lawyer in- 
teracts with a less impersonal Press. It is in the 
great contrasts and the essential parallelism of the 
French and the Anglo-Saxon democratic systems 
that one finds the best practical reason for antici- 
pating very profound changes in these two inevi- 
tables of democracy, the Press and the lawyer-poli- 
tician, and for assuming that the method of democ- 
racy has still a vast range of experimental adjust- 
ment between them still untried. Such experi- 
mental adjustment will be the chief necessity and 
business of political life in every country of the 
world for the next few decades. 

The lawyer-politician and the Press are, as it 
were, the right and left hands of a modern democ- 
racy. The war has brought this out clearly. It 
has ruptured the long-weakened bonds that once 
linked this and that newspaper with this and that 
party. For years the Press of all the Western 
democracies has been drifting slowly away from 
the tradition — it lasted longest and was developed 
most completely in Great Britain — that news- 
papers were party organs. 

In the novels of Disraeli the Press appears as an 
ambiguously helpful person who is asked out to 
dinner, who is even admitted to week-end confer- 



LAWYER AND PRESS 139 

ences, by the political great. He takes his orders 
from the Whig peers or the Troy peers. At his 
greatest he advises them respectfully. But that 
was in the closing days of the British oligarchy; 
that was before modern democracy had begun to 
produce its characteristic political forms. It is not 
so very much more than a century ago that Great 
Britain had her first lawyer Prime Minister. 
Through all the Napoleonic wars she was still a 
country ruled by great feudal landlords and gentle- 
men adventurers associated with them. The law- 
yers only came to their own at the close of the great 
Victorian duet of Disraeli and Gladstone, the last 
of the political gentlemen adventurers. It is only 
now, in the jolts and dissatisfactions of this war, 
that Great Britain rubs her eyes and looks at her 
government as it is. 

The old oligarchy established the tradition of her 
diplomacy. Illiberal at home, it was liberal 
abroad ; Great Britain was the defender of national- 
ity, of constitutionalism, and of the balance of 
power against the holy alliance. In the figure of 
such a gentleman as Sir Edward Grey the old order 
mingles with the new. But most of his colleagues 
are of the new order. They would have been in- 
credible in the days of Lord Melbourne. In its 



%>- 



^ 



140 WHAT IS COMING? 

essential quality the present British government is 
far more closely akin to the French than it is to its 
predecessor of a hundred years ago. Essentially 
it is a government of lawyer-politicians with no 
close family ties or intimate political traditions and 
prejudices. And its natural and proper corrective 
is the Press, over which it fails to exercise now even 
a shadow of the political and social influence that 
once kept that power in subjection. 

It is the way with all human institutions; they 
remain in appearance long after they have passed 
away in reality. It is on record that the Roman 
Senate still thought Eome was a republic in the 
third century of the Christian era. It is nothing 
wonderful, therefore, that people suppose that the 
King, the Lords, and the Commons, debating 
through a Ministry and an Opposition, still govern 
the British Empire. As a matter of fact, it is the 
lawyer-politicians, split by factions that simulate 
the ancient Government and Opposition, who rule, 
under a steadily growing pressure and checking by 
the Press. Since this war began the Press has re- 
leased itself almost inadvertently from its last asso- 
ciation with the dying conflicts of party politics, 
and has taken its place as a distinct pow T er in the 
realm, claiming to be more representative of the 



LAWYEE AND PRESS 141 

people than their elected representatives, and more 
expressive of the national mind and will. 

Now, there is considerable validity in this claim. 
It is easy to say that a paper may be bought by any 
proprietor and set to put what he chooses into the 
public mind. As a matter of fact, buying a news- 
paper is far more costly and public a proceeding 
than buying a politician. And if on the one hand 
the public has no control over what is printed in a 
paper, it has on the other the very completest con- 
trol over what is read. A politician is checked by 
votes cast once in several years, a newspaper is 
checked by sales that vary significantly from day 
to day. A newspaper with no circulation is a news- 
paper that does not matter ; a few weeks will suffice 
to show if it has carried its public with it or gone 
out of influence. It is absurd to speak of a news- 
paper as being less responsible than a politician. 

Nevertheless the influence of a great newspaper 
is so much greater than that of any politician, and 
its power, more particularly for mischief — for the 
creation of panic conditions, for example — so 
much swifter, that it is open to question whether 
the Press is at present sufficiently held to its enor- 
mous responsibilities. Let us consider its weak- 
nesses at the present time ; let us ask what changes 



142 WHAT IS COMING? 

in its circumstances are desirable in the public in- 
terest, and what are likely to come about. We have 
already reckoned upon the Press as a chief factor in 
the adequate criticism, cleansing, and modernisa- 
tion of the British lawyer-politician. Is there any 
power to which we may look for the security of the 
Press? And I submit the answer is the Press. 
For while the legal profession is naturally homo- 
geneous, the Press is by nature heterogeneous. 
Dog does not eat dog, nor lawyer lawyer; but the 
newspapers are sharks and cannibals; they are in 
perpetual conflict ; the Press is a profession as open 
as the law is closed ; it has no anti-social guild feel- 
ing ; it washes its dirty linen in public by choice and 
necessity, and disdains all professional etiquette. 
Few people know what criticisms of the Lord Chief 
Justice may have ripened in the minds of Lord 
Halsbury or Sir Edward Carson, but we all know, 
to a very considerable degree of accuracy, the worst 
of what this great journalist or group of newspaper 
proprietors thinks of that. 

We have therefore considerable reason for regard- 
ing the Press as being, in contrast with the legal 
profession, a self-reforming body. In the last dec- 
ade there has been an enormous mass of criticism 
of the Press by the Press. There has been a tend- 



LAWYER AND PRESS 143 

ency to exaggerate its irresponsibility. A better 
case is to be made against it for what I will call, 
using the word in its least offensive sense, its venal- 
ity. By venality I mean the fact, a legacy from the 
now happily vanishing age of individualism, that in 
theory and law, at least, any one may own a news- 
paper and sell it publicly or secretly to any one, 
that its circulation and advertisement receipts may 
be kept secret or not as the proprietors choose, and 
that the proprietor is accountable to no one for any 
exceptional incomings or any sudden fluctuations 
in policy. A few years ago we were all discussing 
who should buy The Times; I do not know what 
chances an agent of the Kaiser might not have had 
if he had been sufficiently discreet. This venality 
will be far more dangerous to the Allied countries 
after the war than during its continuance. So long 
as the state of war lasts there are prompt methods 
available for any direct newspaper treason, and it 
is in the neutral countries only that the buying and 
selling of papers against the national interest has 
occurred to any marked extent. Directly peace is 
signed, unless we provide for the event beforehand, 
our Press will pass under neutral conditions. 
There will be nothing to prevent, for example, any 
foreseeing foreign Power coming into Great Britain, 



144 WHAT IS COMING? 

offering to buy up not only this paper or that, but 
also, what is far more important, to buy up the 
great book and newspaper distributing firms. 
These vitally important public services so far as 
law and theory go will be as entirely in the market 
as railway tickets at a station, unless we make some 
intelligent preventive provision. Unless we do, 
and if, as is highly probable, peace puts no imme- 
diate stop to international malignity, the Germans 
will be bigger fools than I think them if they do 
not try to get hold of these public services. It is a 
matter of primary importance in the outlook of 
every country in Europe, therefore, that it should 
insist upon and secure responsible native ownership 
of every newspaper and news and book distributing 
agency, and the most drastic punishment for news- 
paper corruption. Given that guarantee against 
foreign bribery, we may, I think, let free speech 
rage. This is so much a matter of common-sense 
that I cannot imagine even British " wait and see " 
waiting for the inevitable assault upon our national 
journalistic virtue that will follow the peace. 

So I spread out the considerations that I think 
justify our forecasting, in a very changed Great 
Britain and a changed Europe, firstly, a legal pro- 
fession with a quickened conscience, a sense of pub- 



LAWYER AND PRESS 145 

lie function and a reformed organisation, and, sec- 
ondly, a Press, which is recognised and held ac- 
countable in law and in men's minds, as an estate 
of the realm, as something implicitly under oath to 
serve the State. I do not agree with Professor 
Michels' pessimistic conclusion that peace will 
bring back exacerbated party politics and a new 
era of futility to the democratic countries. I be- 
lieve that the tremendous demonstration of this 
war (a demonstration that gains weight with every 
week of our lengthening effort), of the waste and 
inefficiency of the system of 1913-14, will break 
down at last even the conservatism of the most 
rigidly organised and powerful and out-of-date of 
all professions. It is not only that I look to the in- 
dignation and energy of intelligent men who are 
outside our legal and political system to reform it, 
but to those who are in it now. A man may be 
quietly parasitic upon his mother, and yet incap- 
able of matricide. So much of our national energy 
and ability has been attracted to the law in Great 
Britain that our nation with our lawyers in modern 
clothing instead of wigs and gown, lawyers who 
have studied science and social theory instead of the 
spoutings of Cicero and loquacious artfulness of W. 
E. Gladstone, lawyers who look forward at the des- 



146 WHAT IS COMING? 

tiny of their country instead of backward and at the 
markings on their briefs, may yet astonish the 
world. The British lawyer really holds the future 
of the British Empire, and, indeed, I could almost 
say, of the whole world, in his hands at the present 
time, as much as any single sort of man can be said 
to hold it. Inside his skull imagination and a 
heavy devil of evil precedent fight for his soul and 
the welfare of the world. And generosity fights 
against tradition and individualism. Only the 
men of the Press have anything like the same great 
possibilities of betrayal. To these two sorts of men 
the dim spirit of the nation looks for such leading 
as a democracy can follow. To them the men with 
every sort of special ability, the men of science, the 
men of this or that sort of administrative ability 
and experience, the men of creative gifts and habits, 
every sort of man who wants the world to get on, 
look for the removal (or the ingenious contrivance) 
of obstructions and entanglements, for the allaying 
(or the fomentation) of suspicion, misapprehen- 
sion, and ignorant opposition, for administration 
(or class blackmail). 

Yet while I sit as a prophetic amateur weighing 
these impalpable forces of will and imagination 
and habit and interest in lawyer, Pressman, maker 



LAWYER AND PRESS 147 

and administrator, and feeling by no means over- 
confident of the issue, it dawns upon me suddenly 
that there is another figure present, who has never 
been present before in the reckoning up of British 
affairs. It is a silent figure. This figure stands 
among the Pressmen and among the lawyers and 
among the workers ; for a couple of decades at least 
he will be everywhere in the British system; he is 
young and he is uniformed in khaki, and he brings 
with him a new spirit into British life, the spirit of 
the new soldier, the spirit of subordination to a 
common purpose. . . . 

France, which has lived so much farther and 
deeper and more bitterly than Britain, knows. . . .* 

* In Social Forces in England and America, a companion 
volume to the present one, the reader will find a full discussion 
of the probahle benefit of proportional representation in elimi- 
nating the party hack from political life. Proportional repre- 
sentation would probably break up party organisations alto- 
gether, and it would considerably enhance toe importance and 
responsibility of the Press. It would do much to accelerate 
the development of the state of affairs here foreshadowed, in 
which the role of government and opposition under the party 
system will be played by elected representatives and Press re- 
spectively. 



VII 

THE NEW EDUCATION 

Some few months ago, Mr. Harold Spender, in the 
Daily News, was calling attention to a very signifi- 
cant fact indeed. The higher education in Eng- 
land, and more particularly the educational process 
of Oxford and Cambridge, which has been going on 
continuously since the Middle Ages, is practically 
in a state of suspense. Oxford and Cambridge 
have stopped. They have stopped so completely 
that Mr. Spender can speculate whether they can 
ever pick up again and resume upon the old lines. 
For my own part, as the father of two sons who 
are at present in mid-school, I hope with all my 
heart that they will not. I hope that the Oxford 
and Cambridge of unphilosophical classics and 
little-go Greek for everybody, don's mathematics, 
bad French, ignorance of all Europe except Switzer- 
land, forensic exercises in the Union Debating So- 
ciety, and cant about the Gothic, the Oxford and 
Cambridge that turned boys full of life and hope 
and infinite possibility into barristers, politicians, 

148 



THE NEW EDUCATION 149 

mono-lingual diplomatists, bishops, schoolmasters, 
company directors, and remittance men, are even 
now dead. Quite recently I passed through Cam- 
bridge, and, with the suggestions of Mr. Spender in 
my mind, I paused for a time to savour the atmos- 
phere of the place. I realised that he had very 
greatly understated the facts of the case. He laid 
stress upon the fact that instead of the normal four 
thousand undergraduates or so there are now 
scarcely four hundred. But before I was fairly in 
Cambridge I realised that that gives no idea of 
the real cessation of English education. Of the 
first seven undergraduates I saw upon the Trump- 
ington road one was black, three were coloured, and 
one of the remaining three was certainly not Brit- 
ish but, I should guess, Spanish-American. And it 
isn't only the undergraduates who have gone. All 
the dons of military age and quality have gone too, 
or are staying up not in caps and gowns but in 
khaki; all the vigorous teachers are soldiering; 
there are no dons left except those who are unfit for 
service — and the clergy. Buildings, libraries, 
empty laboratories, empty lecture theatres, vestiges, 
refugees, neutrals, khaki; that is Cambridge to- 
day. 

There never was before, there never may be again, 



150 WHAT IS COMING? 

so wonderful an opportunity for a cleaning-up and 
sweeping-out of those two places, and for a profit- 
able new start in British education. 

The cessation of Oxford and Cambridge does not 
give the full measure of the present occasion. All 
the other British universities are in a like case. 
And the schools which feed them have been prac- 
tically swept clean of their senior boys. And not a 
tithe of any of this war class of school boys will ever 
go to the universities now, not a tithe of the war 
class of undergraduates will ever return. Between 
the new education and the old, there will be a break 
of two school generations. For the next thirty or 
forty years an exceptional class of men will play a 
leading part in British affairs, men who will have 
learnt more from reality and less from lectures than 
either the generations that preceded or the genera- 
tions that will follow them; the subalterns of the 
great war will form a distinct generation and mark 
an epoch. Their experiences of need, their sense 
of deficiences, will certainly play a large part in 
the reconstitution of the British education. The 
stamp of the old system will not be on them. 

Now is the time to ask what sort of training 
should a university give to produce the ruling, di- 
recting, and leading men which it exists to pro- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 151 

duce? Upon that Great Britain will need to make 
up its mind speedily. It is not a matter for to-mor- 
row or the day after ; it is necessary to decide now 
what it is the Britain that is coming will need and 
want, and to set to work revising the admission and 
degree requirements and reconstructing all those 
systems of public examinations for the public serv- 
ices that necessarily dominate school and university 
teaching, before the universities and schools re- 
assemble. If the rotten old things once get to- 
gether again, the rotten old things will have a new 
lease of life. This and no other is the hour for edu- 
cational reconstruction. And it is in the decisions 
and readjustments of schools and lectures and 
courses, far more than anywhere else, that the real 
future of Great Britain will be decided. Equally 
true is this of all the belligerent countries. Much 
of the future has a kind of mechanical inevitable- 
ness, but here, far more than anywhere else, can a 
few resolute and capable men mould the spirit and 
determine the quality of the Europe to come. 

Now surely the chief things that are needed in 
the education of a ruling class are these — First 
the selection and development of Character, then 
the selection and development of Capacity, and 
thirdly, the imparting of Knowledge upon broad 



152 WHAT IS COMING? 

and comprehensive lines, and the power of rapidly 
taking up and using such detailed knowledge as 
may be needed for special occasions. It is upon the 
first count that the British schools and universities 
have been most open to criticism. We have found 
the British university -trained class under the fiery 
tests of this war an evasive, temporising class of 
people, individualistic, ungenerous, and unable 
either to produce or obey vigorous leadership. On 
the whole, it is a matter for congratulation, it says 
wonderful things for the inherent natural qualities 
of the English-speaking people, that things have 
proved no worse than they are, considering the na- 
ture of the higher education under which they have 
suffered. 

Consider in what that educational process has 
consisted. Its backbone has been the teaching of 
Latin by men who can read, write, and speak it 
rather worse than a third-rate Babu speaks Eng- 
lish, and of Ancient Greek by teachers who at best 
half know this fine lost language. They do not 
expect any real mastery of either tongue by their 
students, and naturally therefore no real mastery 
is ever attained. The boys and young men just 
muff about at it for three times as long as would 
be needed to master completely both those tongues 



THE NEW EDUCATION 153 

if they had " live " teachers, and so they acquire 
habits of busy futility and petty pedantry in all 
intellectual processes that haunt them throughout 
life. There are also sterile mathematical studies 
that never get from " exercises ?1 to practice. 
There is a pretence of studying philosophy based on 
Greek texts that few of the teachers and none of 
the taught can read comfortably, and a certain 
amount of history. The Modern History School at 
Oxford, for example, is the queerest collection of 
chunks of reading. English history from the be- 
ginning, with occasional glances at continental af- 
fairs, European history for about a century, bits of 
economics, and — the Politics of Aristotle ! It is 
not education ; it is a jackdaw collection. . . . This 
sort of jumble has been the essentials of the more 
pretentious type of " higher education " available 
in Great Britain up to the present. Through all 
the most sensitive and receptive years of life our 
boys have been trained in " how not to get there/' 
in a variety of disconnected subjects, by men who 
have never " got there," and it would be difficult 
to imagine any curriculum more calculated to 
produce a miscellaneous incompetence. They have 
also, it happens, received a certain training in sa- 
voir faire through the collective necessities of school 



154 WHAT IS COMING? 

life, and a certain sharpening in the arts of ad- 
vocacy through the debating society. Except for 
these latter helps, they have had to face the world 
with minds neither more braced, nor more trained, 
nor more informed than any " uneducated " man's. 
Surely the first condition that should be laid 
down for the new education in Europe is that what- 
ever is undertaken must be undertaken in grim 
earnest and done. It is ridiculous to talk about 
the " character-forming " value of any study that 
does not go through to an end. Manifestly Greek 
must be dropped as a part of the general curricu- 
lum for a highly educated man, for the simple rea- 
son that now there are scarcely any competent 
teachers, and because the sham of teaching it par 
tially and pretentiously demoralises student and 
school alike. The claim of the clergy and so forth 
to " know " Greek is one of the many corrupting 
lies in British intellectual life. English comic 
writers never weary of sneering at the Hindu who 
claimed to be a "failed B. A.," but what is the 
ordinary classical degree man of an English uni- 
versity but a " failed " Greek scholar? Latin, too, 
must be either reduced to the position of a study 
supplementary to the native tongue, or brought up 
to an honest level of efficiency. French and Ger- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 155 

man in the case of the English, and English in the 
case of the French and Russians, are essentially 
governess languages; any intelligent boy or girl 
from a reasonably prosperous home ought to be 
able to read, write, and speak either before fifteen ; 
they are to be taken by the way rather than re- 
garded as a fundamental part of education. The 
French, German, or English literature and liter- 
ary development up to and including contemporary 
work is of course an entirely different matter. But 
there can be no doubt of the great educational value 
of some highly inflected and well-developed lan- 
guage taught by men to whom it is a genuine means 
of expression. Educational needs and public ne- 
cessity point alike to such languages as Russian or, 
in the case of Great Britain, Hindustani to supply 
this sound training. If Great Britain means busi- 
ness after this war, if she is to do her duty by the 
Eastern world she controls, she will not stick at 
the petty expense of getting a few hundreds of good 
Russian and Hindu teachers into the country, and 
she will place Russian and Hindustani upon at 
least an equal footing with Greek in all her uni- 
versity and competitive examinations. Moreover, 
it is necessary to set a definite aim of application 
before university mathematical teaching. As the 



156 WHAT IS COMING? 

first condition of character-building in all these 
things the student should do what he ostensibly 
sets out to do. No degree and no position should 
be attainable by half accomplishment. 

Of course languages and mathematics do not by 
any means round off the education of a man of the 
leading classes. There is no doubt much exercise 
in their attainment, much value in their possession. 
But the essence of the higher education is now, as 
it always has been, philosophy ; not the antiquated 
pretence of " reading " Plato and Aristotle, but the 
thorough and subtle examination of those great 
questions of life that most exercise and strengthen 
the mind. Surely that is the essential difference 
of the " educated " and the " common " man. The 
former has thought and thought out thoroughly and 
clearly the relations of his mind to the universe as 
a whole, and of himself to the State and life. A 
mind untrained in swift and adequate criticism is 
essentially an uneducated mind, though it has as 
many languages as a courier and as much computa- 
tion as a bookie. Our fundamental purpose in all 
this reform of our higher education is neither 
knowledge nor technical skill, but to make our 
young men talk less and think more, and to think 
more swiftly, surely, and exactly ; for that we want 



THE NEW EDUCATION 157 

less debating society and more philosophy, fewer 
prizes for forensic ability and more for strength 
and vigour of analysis. The central seat of char- 
acter is the mind. A man of weak character thinks 
vaguely, a man of clear intellectual decisions acts 
with precision and is free from vacillation. A 
country of educated men acts coherently, smites 
swiftly, plans ahead; a country of confused edu- 
cation is a country of essential muddle. 

It is as the third factor in education that the 
handling and experience of knowledge comes, and 
of all knowledge that which is most accessible, 
most capable of being handled with the greatest 
variety of educational benefit, so as to include the 
criticism of evidence, the massing of facts, the ex- 
traction and testing of generalisations, lies in the 
two groups of the biological sciences and the exact 
sciences. No doubt a well-planned system of edu- 
cation will permit of much varied specialisation, 
will indeed specialise those who have special gifts 
from a very early age, will have corners for Greek, 
Hebrew, Sanscrit, philology, archaeology, Chris- 
tian theology, and so on and so on ; nevertheless for 
that great mass of sound men of indeterminate all- 
round ability who are the intellectual and moral 
backbone of a nation, it is in scientific studies that 



158 WHAT IS COMING? 

their best training lies, studies most convenient to 
undertake and most readily applied in life. From 
either of the two groups of the sciences one may 
pass on to research or to technical applications 
leading directly to the public service. The bio- 
logical sciences broaden out through psychology 
and sociology to the theory and practice of law, and 
to political life. They lead also to medical and 
agricultural administration. The exact sciences 
lead to the administrative work of industrialism, 
and to general economics. 

These are the broad, clear lines of the educational 
necessities of a modern community, plain enough 
to see, so that every man who is not blinded by prej- 
udice and self-interest can see them to-day. We 
have now before us a phase of opportunity in edu- 
cational organisation that will never recur again. 
Now that the apostolic succession of the old peda- 
gogy is broken, and the entire system discredited, 
it seems incredible that it can ever again be recon- 
stituted in its old seats upon the old lines. In 
these raw, harsh days of boundless opportunity, the 
opportunity of the new education, because it is the 
most fundamental, is assuredly the greatest of all. 



VIII 
WHAT THE WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 

§ 1 

To discuss the effect of this war upon the relations 
of men and women to each other is to enter upon 
the analysis of a secular process compared with 
which even the vast convulsions and destructions of 
this world catastrophe appear only as jolts and in- 
cidents and temporary interruptions. There are 
certain matters that sustain a perennial develop- 
ment, that are on a scale beyond the dramatic hap- 
penings of history; wars, the movements of peo- 
ples and races, economic changes, such things may 
accelerate or stimulate or confuse or delay, but they 
cannot arrest the endless thinking out, the growth 
and perfecting of ideas, upon the fundamental re- 
lationships of human beings. First among such 
eternally progressive issues is religion, the relation- 
ship of man to God; next in importance and still 
more immediate is the matter of men's relations to 
women. In such matters each phase is a new 
phase; whatever happens there is no going back 
and beginning over again. The social life, like the 

159 



160 WHAT IS COMING? 

religious life, must grow and change, until the hu- 
man story is at an end. 

So that this war involves, in this as in so many 
matters, no fundamental set-back, no reversals nor 
restorations. At the most it will but realise things 
already imagined, release things latent. The nine- 
teenth century was a period of unprecedented modi- 
fication of social relationships, but great as these 
changes were they were trivial in comparison with 
the changes in religious thought and the criticism 
of moral ideals. Hell was the basis of religious 
thinking in A. D. 1800, and the hangman was at the 
back of the law ; in 1900 both Hell and the hangman 
seemed on the verge of extinction. The creative 
impulse was everywhere replacing fear and compul- 
sion in human motives. The opening decade of the 
twentieth century was a period of unprecedented 
abundance in everything necessary to human life, 
of vast accumulated resources, of leisure and re- 
lease. It was also, because of that and because of 
the changed social and religious spirit, a period of 
great social disorganisation and confused impulses. 

We British can already look back to the opening 
half of 1914 as to an age gone for ever. Except 
that we were all alive then and can remember, it 
has become now almost as remote, almost as " his- 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 161 

torical," as the days before the French Revolution. 
Our days, our methods and reactions, are already 
so different. The greater part of the freedom of 
movement, the travel and going to and fro, the 
leisure, the plenty and carelessness, that distin- 
guished early twentieth century life from early 
nineteenth century life, has disappeared. Most 
men are under military discipline, and every house- 
hold economises. The whole British people has 
been brought up against such elementary realities 
of need, danger, and restraint as it never realised 
before. We discover that we had been living like 
Olympians in regard to worldly affairs, we had 
been irresponsibles, amateurs. Much of that fat- 
ness of life, the wrappings and trimmings of our 
life, has been stripped off altogether. That has not 
altered the bones of life; it has only made them 
plainer ; but it has astonished us as much as if look- 
ing into a looking-glass one suddenly found oneself 
a skeleton. Or a diagram. 

What was going on before this war in the rela- 
tions of men and women is going on still, with more 
rapidity perhaps, and certainly with more thor- 
oughness. The war is accentuating, developing, 
defining. Previously our discussions and poses 
and movements had merely the air of seeking to 



162 WHAT IS COMING? 

accentuate and define. What was apparently be- 
ing brought about by discursive efforts and in a 
mighty controversy and confusion, is coming about 
now as a matter of course. 

Before the war, in the British community as in 
most civilised communities, profound changes were 
already in progress, changes in the conditions of 
women's employment, in the political status of 
women, in the status of illegitimate children, in 
manners and customs affecting the sexes. Every 
civilised community was exhibiting a falling birth 
rate and a falling death rate, was changing the 
quality of its housing and dimiuishing domestic 
labour by organising supplies and developing ap- 
pliances. That is to say, that primary human unit, 
the home, was altering in shape and size and fre- 
quency and colour and effect. A steadily increas- 
ing proportion of people were living outside the old 
family home, the home based on maternity and off- 
spring, altogether. A number of us were doing our 
best to apprehend the summation of all this flood of 
change. We had a vague idea that women were 
somehow being " emancipated," but just what this 
word meant and what it implied were matters still 
under exploration. Then came the war. For a 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 163 

time it seemed as if all this discussion was at an 
end, as if the problem itself had vanished. 

But that was only a temporary distraction of at- 
tention. The process of change swirled into new 
forms that did not fit very easily into the accepted 
formulae, swirled into new forms and continued on 
its way. If the discussion ceased for a time, the 
process of change ceased not at all. Matters have 
travelled all the farther in the last two years for 
travelling mutely. The questions between men 
and women are far more important and far more 
incessant than the questions between Germans and 
the rest of mankind. They are coming back now 
into the foreground of human thought, but amended 
and altered. Our object is to state the general na- 
ture of that alteration. It has still been " emanci- 
pation," but very different in quality from the 
" emancipation " that was demanded so loudly and 
incoherently in that ancient world — of 1913 ! 

Never had the relations of men and women been 
so uneasy as they were in the opening decades 
of 1914. The woman's movement battered and 
banged through all our minds. It broke out into 
that tumult in Great Britain perhaps ten years ago. 
When Queen Victoria died it was inaudible ; search 



164 WHAT IS COMING? 

Punch, search the newspapers of that tranquil age. 
In 1914 it kicked up so great a dust that the Ger- 
mans counted on the Suffragettes as one of the 
great forces that were to paralyse England in the 
war. The extraordinary thing was that the move- 
ment was never clearly defined during all the time 
of its maximum violence. We begin to perceive in 
the retrospect that the movement was multiple, 
made up of a number of very different movements 
interwoven. It seemed to concentrate upon the 
Vote; but it was never possible to find even why 
women wanted the vote. Some, for example, al- 
leged that it was because they were like men, and 
some because they were entirely different. The 
broad facts that one could not mistake were a vast 
feminine discontent and a vast display of feminine 
energy. What had brought that about? 

Two statistical factors are to be considered here. 
One of these was the steady decline in the marriage 
rate, and the increasing proportion of unmarried 
women of all classes, but particularly of the more 
educated classes, requiring employment. The sec- 
ond was the fall in the birth rate, the diminution in 
size of the average family, the increase of sterile 
unions, and the consequent release of a consider- 
able proportion of the energy of married women. 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 165 

Co-operating with these factors of release were the 
economic elaborations that were improving the ap- 
pliances of domestic life, replacing the needle by 
the sewing machine, the coal fire and lamp by gas 
and electricity, the dustpan and brush by the pneu- 
matic carpet cleaner, and taking out of the house 
into the shop and factory, the baking, much of the 
cooking, the making of clothes, the laundry work, 
and so forth, that had hitherto kept so many women 
at home and too busy to think. The care of even 
such children as there were, was also less arduous ; 
creche and school held out hands for them, ready 
to do even that duty better. And side by side with 
these releases was a rise in the standard of educa- 
tion that was stimulating the minds and imagina- 
tions of woman beyond a point where the needle — 
even if there had been any use for the needle — can 
be an opiate. Moreover, the world was growing 
richer, and growing richer in such a way that not 
only were leisure and desire increasing but, because 
of increasingly scientific methods of production, the 
need in many branches of employment for any but 
very keen and able workers was diminishing. So 
that simultaneously the world, that vanished world 
before 1914, was releasing and disengaging enor- 
mous volumes of untrained and unassigned femi- 



166 WHAT IS COMING? 

nine energy and also diminishing usefulness of un- 
skilful effort in every department of life. There 
was no demand to meet the supply. These were the 
underlying processes that produced the feminist 
outbreak of the decade before the war. 

Now the debate between the sexes is a perennial. 
It began while we were still in the trees. It has 
its stereotyped accusations; its stereotyped repar- 
tees. The Canterbury Pilgrims had little to learn 
from Christabel Pankhurst. Man and woman in 
that duet struggle perpetually for the upper hand, 
and the man restrains the woman and the woman 
resents the man. In every age some voice has been 
heard asserting, like Plato, that the woman is a hu- 
man being, and the prompt answer has been, " But 
such a different human being." Wherever there is 
a human difference fair play is difficult; the uni- 
versal clash of races witnesses to that, and sex is 
the greatest of human differences. 

But the general trend of mankind towards in- 
telligence and reason has been also a trend away 
from a superstitious treatment of sexual ques- 
tions and a recognition, so to speak, that a woman's 
" a man for a' that," that she is indeed as entitled 
to an independent soul and a separate voice in col- 
lective affairs. As brain has counted for more and 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 167 

more in the human effort and brute strength and 
the advantage of not bearing children for less and 
less, as man has felt a greater need for a companion 
and a lesser need for a slave, and as the increase of 
food and the protection of the girl from premature 
child-bearing has approximated the stature and 
strength and enterprise of the woman more and 
more to that of the man, this secular emancipation 
of the human female from the old herd subordina- 
tion and servitude to the patriarchal male has gone 
on. Essentially the secular process has been an 
equalising process. It was merely the exaggera- 
tion of its sustaining causes during the plenty and 
social and intellectual expansion of the last half 
century that had stimulated this secular process to 
the pitch of crisis. 

There have always been two extreme aspects of 
the sexual debate. There have always been the 
oversexed women who wanted to be treated pri- 
marily as women, and the women who were irri- 
tated and bored by being treated primarily as 
women. There have always been those women who 
wanted to get, like Joan of Arc, into masculine at- 
tire, and the school of the " mystical darlings." 
There have always been the women who wanted to 
share men's work and the women who wanted to 



168 WHAT IS COMING? 

" inspire " it, the mates and the mistresses. Of 
course the mass of women lies between these ex- 
tremes. But it is possible nevertheless to discuss 
this question as though it were a conflict of two 
sharply opposed ideals. It is convenient to write 
as if there were just these two sorts of women be- 
cause so one can get a sharp definition in the pic- 
ture. The ordinary woman fluctuates between the 
two, turns now to the Western ideal of citizenship 
and now to the Eastern of submission. These 
ideals fight not only in human society but in every 
woman's career. Chitra in Rabindra Nath Tagore's 
play, for example, tried both aspects of the wom- 
an's life, and Tagore is at one with Plato in pre- 
ferring the Rosalind type to the houri. And with 
him I venture to think is the clear reason of man- 
kind. The real " emancipation " to which reason 
and the trend of things makes is from the yielding 
to the energetic side of a woman's disposition, from 
beauty enthroned for love towards the tall, weather- 
hardened woman with a spear, loving her mate as 
her mate loves her, and as sexless as a man in all 
her busy hours. 

But it was not simply the energies that tended 
towards this particular type that were set free dur- 
ing the latter half of the nineteenth century. 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 169 

Every sort of feminine energy was set free. And 
it was not merely the self-reliant, independence- 
seeking women who were discontented. The ladies 
who specialised in feminine arts and graces and 
mysteries were also dissatisfied. They found they 
were not important enough. The former type 
found itself insufficiently respected, and the latter 
type found itself insufficiently adored. The two 
mingled their voices in the most confusing way in 
the literature of the suffrage movement before the 
war. The two tendencies mingle confusingly in the 
minds of the women that this movement was stir- 
ring up to think. The Vote became the symbol for 
absolutely contradictory things ; there is scarcely a 
single argument for it in suffragist literature that 
cannot be completely negatived out of suffragist 
literature. 

For example, compare the writings of Miss Cicely 
Hamilton, the distinguished actress, with the pub- 
lications of the Pankhurst family. The former ex- 
presses a claim that, except for prejudice, a woman 
is as capable a citizen as a man and differing only 
in her sex; the latter consist of a long rhapsody 
upon the mystical superiorities of women and the 
marvellous benefits mankind will derive from hand- 
ing things over to these sacred powers. The 



170 WHAT IS COMING? 

former would get rid of sex from most human af- 
fairs; the latter would make what our Georgian 
grandfathers called " The Sex " rule the world. 
Or compare the dark coquettings of Miss Elizabeth 
Robins' Woman' 8 Secret with the virile common- 
sense of that most brilliant young writer, Miss Re- 
becca West, in her bitter onslaught on feminine 
limitations, in the opening chapters of The World's 
Worst Failure. The former is an extravagance of 
sexual mysticism. Man can never understand 
women. Women always hide deep and wonderful 
things away beyond masculine discovery. Men do 
not even suspect. Some day perhaps — It is 
some one peeping from behind a curtain, and invit- 
ing men in provocative tones to come and play catch 
in a darkened harem. The latter is like some gal- 
lant soldier cursing his silly accoutrements. It is 
a hearty outbreak against that apparent necessity 
for elegance and sexual specialisation that under- 
cuts so much feminine achievement, that reduces so 
much feminine art and writing to vapidity and 
holds back women from the face of danger and 
brave and horrible deaths. It is West to Miss 
Robins' East. And yet I believe I am right in say- 
ing that all these four women writers have jostled 
one another upon suffrage platforms, and that they 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 171 

all suffered blows and injuries in the same cause, 
during the various riots and conflicts that occurred 
in London in the course of the great agitation. It 
was only when the agitation of the Pankhurst 
family, aided by Miss Robins' remarkable book, 
Where are you Going To? took a form that threat- 
ened to impose the most extraordinary restrictions 
on the free movements of women, and to establish a 
sort of universal purdah of hostility and suspicion 
against those degraded creatures, those stealers and 
destroyers of women, " the men," that the British 
feminist movement displayed any tendency to dis- 
sociate into its opposed and divergent strands. 

It is a little detail, but a very significant one in 
this connection, that the committee that organised 
the various great suffrage processions in London 
were torn by dispute about the dresses of the pro- 
cessionists. It was urged that a " masculine style 
of costume " discredited the movement, and women 
were urged to dress with a maximum of feminine 
charm. Many women obtained finery they could ill 
afford, to take part in these demonstrations, and 
minced their steps as womanly as possible to free- 
dom. . . . 

It would be easy to overstate the efflorescence of 
distinctively feminine emotion, dressiness, mysti- 



172 WHAT IS COMING? 

cism, and vanity upon the suffrage movement. 
Those things showed for any one to see. This was 
the froth of the whirlpool. What did not show 
was the tremendous development of the sense of 
solidarity among women. Everybody knew that 
women had been hitting policemen at Westminster ; 
it was not nearly so showy a fact that women of 
title, working women, domestic servants, trades- 
men's wives, professional workers, had all been 
meeting together and working together in a com- 
mon cause, working with an unprecedented capacity 
and an unprecedented disregard of social barriers. 
One noted the nonsensical byplay of the move- 
ment; the way in which women were accustoming 
themselves to higher standards of achievement was 
not so immediately noticeable. That a small num- 
ber of women were apparently bent on rendering 
the Vote impossible by a campaign of violence and 
malicious mischief, very completely masked the fact 
that a very great number of girls and young women 
no longer considered it seemly to hang about at 
home trying by a few crude inducements to tempt 
men to marry them, but were setting out very seri- 
ously and capably to master the young man's way 
of finding a place for oneself in the world. Be- 
neath the dust and noise realities were coming 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 173 

about that the dust and noise entirely failed to rep- 
resent. We know that some women were shriek- 
ing for the Vote ; we did not realise that a genera- 
tion of women was qualifying for it. 

The war came, the jolt of an earthquake, to throw 
things into their proper relationships. 

The immediate result was the disappearance of 
the militant suffragists from public view for a time, 
into which the noisier section hastened to emerge 
in full scream upon the congenial topic of War 
Babies. " Men/' those dreadful creatures, were 
being camped and quartered all over the country. 
It followed from all the social principles known to 
Mrs. and Miss Pankhurst that it was necessary to 
provide for an enormous number of War Babies. 
Subscriptions were invited. Statisticians are still 
looking rather perplexedly for those War Babies; 
the illegitimate birth rate has fallen, and what has 
become of the subscriptions I do not know. The 
" Suffragette " rechristened itself " Britannia," 
dropped the War Baby agitation, and after an in- 
terlude of self-control, broke out into denunciations 
first of this public servant and then of that, as 
traitors and German spies. Finally it discovered 
a mare's nest in the case of Sir Edward Grey that 
led to its suppression, and the last I have from this 



174 WHAT IS COMING? 

misleading and unrepresentative feminist faction is 
the periodic appearance of a little ill-printed sheet 
of abuse about the chief Foreign Office people, re- 
sembling in manner and appearance the sort of de- 
nunciatory letter, at once suggestive and evasive, 
that might be written by the curate's discharged 
cook. And with that the aggressive section of the 
suffragist movement seems to have petered out, 
leaving the broad reality of feminine emancipation 
to go on in a beneficent silence. 

There can be no question that the behaviour of 
the great mass of women in Great Britain has not 
simply exceeded expectation but hope. And there 
can be as little doubt that the suffrage question, 
in spite of the self -advertising violence of its ex- 
travagant section, did contribute very materially to 
build up the confidence, the willingness to under- 
take responsibility and face hardship, that has been 
so abundantly displayed by every class of woman. 
It is not simply that there has been enough women 
and to spare for hospital work and every sort of re- 
lief and charitable service; that sort of thing has 
been done before, that was in the tradition of wom- 
anhood. It is that at every sort of occupation, 
clerking, shop-keeping, railway work, automobile 
driving, agricultural work, police work, they have 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 175 

been found efficient beyond precedent and intelli- 
gent beyond precedent. And in the munition fac- 
tories, in the handling of heavy and often difficult 
machinery, and in adaptability and inventiveness 
and enthusiasm and steadfastness, their achieve- 
ment has been astonishing. More particularly in 
relation to intricate mechanical work is their rec- 
ord remarkable and unexpected. There is scarcely 
a point where women, having been given a chance, 
have not more than made good. They have revo- 
lutionised the estimate of their economic impor- 
tance, and it is scarcely too much to say that when 
in the long run the military strength of the Allies 
bears down the strength of Germany, it will be this 
superiority of our women which enables us to pit 
a woman at — the Censorship will object to exact 
geography upon this point — against a man at Es- 
sen, which has tipped the balance of this war. 

Those women have won the vote. Not the most 
frantic outbursts of militancy after this war can 
prevent them getting it. The girls who have faced 
death and wounds so gallantly in our cordite fac- 
tories — there is a not inconsiderable list of dead 
and wounded from those places — have killed for 
ever the poor argument that women should not vote 
because they had no military value. Indeed they 



176 WHAT IS COMING? 

have killed every argument against their subjection. 
And while they do these things, that paragon of 
the virtues of the old type, that miracle of do- 
mestic obedience, the German haus-frau, the faith- 
ful Gretchen, riots for butter. 

And as I have before remarked, the Germans 
counted on the suffragettes as one of the great 
forces that were to paralyse England in this war. 

It is not simply that the British women have so 
bountifully produced intelligence and industry; 
that does not begin their record. They have been 
willing to go dowdy. The mass of women in Great 
Britain are wearing the clothes of 1914. In 1913 
every girl and woman one saw in the streets of Lon- 
don had an air of doing her best to keep in the 
fashion. Now they are for the most part as care- 
lessly dressed as a busy business man or a clever 
young student might have been. They are none the 
less pretty for that, and far more beautiful. But 
the fashions have floated away to absurdity. Every 
now and then through the austere bustle of London 
in war time drifts a last practitioner of the " eter- 
nal feminine " — with the air of a foreign visitor, 
with the air of devotion to some peculiar cult. She 
has very high-heeled boots ; she shows a leg, she has 
a skimpy skirt with a peculiar hang, due no doubt 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 177 

to mysteries about the waist; she wears a comic 
little hat over one brow; there is something of Co- 
lumbine about her, something of the Watteau shep- 
herdess, something of a vivandiere, something of 
every age but the present age. Her face, subject to 
the strange dictates of the mode, is smooth like the 
back of a spoon, with small features and little whis- 
ker-like curls before the ears such as butcher-boys 
used to wear half a century ago. Even so, she dare 
not do this thing alone. Something in khaki is 
with her, to justify her. You are to understand 
that this strange rig is for seeing him off or giving 
him a good time during his leave. Sometimes she 
is quite elderly, sometimes nothing khaki is to be 
got, and the pretence that this is desired of her 
wears thin. Still, the type will out. 

She does not pass wHh impunity, the last ex- 
ponent of true feminine charm. The vulgar, the 
street boy, have evolved one of those strange say- 
ings that have the air of being fragments from some 
lost and forgotten chant : 

" She's the Army Contractor's Only Daughter, 
Spending it now." 

Or simply, " Spending it now." 
She does not pass with impunity, but she passes. 
She makes her stilted passage across the arena upon 



178 WHAT IS COMING? 

which the new womanhood of western Europe 
shows its worth. It is an exit. There is likely to 
be something like a truce in the fashions through- 
out Europe for some years. It is in America if 
anywhere that the holy fires of smartness and the 
fashion will be kept alive. . . . 

And so we come to prophecy. 

I do not believe that this invasion by women of a 
hundred employments hitherto closed to them is a 
temporary arrangement that will be reversed after 
the war. It is a thing that was going on, very 
slowly it is true and against much prejudice and 
opposition, before the war, but it was going on; it 
is in the nature of things. These women no doubt 
enter these employments as substitutes, but not 
usually as inferior substitutes; in quite a number 
of cases they are as good as men, and in many they 
are not underselling, they are drawing men's pay. 
What reason is there to suppose that they will re- 
lapse into a state of superfluous energy after the 
war ? The war has merely brought about, with the 
rapidity of a landslide, a state of affairs for which 
the world was ripe. The world after the war will 
have to adjust itself to this extension of women's 
employment, and to this increase in the proportion 
of self-respecting, self-supporting women. 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 179 

Contributing very largely to the establishment 
of this greatly enlarged class of independent women 
will be the great shortage for the next decade of 
marriageable men, due to the killing and disable- 
ment of the war. The women of the next decades 
will not only be able to get along economically with- 
out marriage, but they will find it much more diffi- 
cult to marry. It will also probably be a period in 
which a rise in prices may, as it usually does, pre- 
cede the compensating rise in wages. It may be 
that for some years it will be more difficult to main- 
tain a family. This will be a third factor in the 
fixation of this class of bachelor women. 

Various writers, brooding over the coming short- 
age of men, have jumped to the conclusion that 
polygamy is among the probabilities of the near fu- 
ture. They write in terms of real or affected alarm 
for which there is no justification ; they wallow in 
visions of Germany " legalising " polygamy, and see 
Berlin seeking recuperation in man power by con- 
verting herself into another Salt Lake City. But 
I do not think that Germany in the face of the 
economic ring that the Allies will certainly draw 
about her is likely to desire a very great increase 
in population for the next few years; I do not see 
any great possibility of a specially rich class ca- 



180 WHAT IS COMING? 

pable of maintaining numerous wives being sus- 
tained by the impoverished and indebted world of 
Europe, nor the sources from which a supply of 
women preferring to become constituents in a 
polygamous constellation rather than self-support- 
ing free women, is to be derived. The tempera- 
mental dislike of intelligent women to polygamy is 
at least as strong as a man's objection to poly- 
andry. Polygamy, open or hidden, flourishes 
widely only where there are women to be bought. 
Moreover, there are considerable obstacles in reli- 
gion and custom to be overcome by the innovating 
polygamist — even in Germany. It might mean a 
breach of the present good relations between Ger- 
many and the Vatican. The relative inferiority of 
the tradition of the German to that of most other 
European women, its relative disposition towards 
feminine servitude, is no doubt a consideration on 
the other scale of this discussion, but I do not 
think it is one heavy enough to tilt back the beam. 
So far from a great number of men becoming 
polygamists, I think it would be possible to show 
cause for supposing that an increasing proportion 
will cease even to be monogamists. The romantic 
excitements of the war have produced a temporary 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 181 

rise in the British marriage rate; but before the 
war it had been falling slowly and the average age 
at marriage had been rising, and it is quite possible 
that this process will be presently resumed and, as 
a new generation grows up to restore the balance 
of the sexes, accelerated. 

We conclude therefore that this increase in the 
class of economically independent bachelor women 
that is now taking place is a permanent increase. 
It is probably being reinforced by a considerable 
number of war widows who will not remarry. We 
have to consider in what directions this mass of 
capable, intelligent, energetic, undomesticated free- 
women is likely to develop, what its effect will be 
on social usage, and particularly how it will react 
upon the lives of the married women about them. 
Because, as we have already pointed out in this 
paper, the release of feminine energy upon which 
the feminist problem depends, is twofold, being due 
not only to the increased unmarriedness of women 
through the disproportion of the sexes and the rise 
in the age of marriage but also to the decreased 
absorption of married women in domestic duties. 
A woman, from the point of view of this discussion, 
is not " married and done for " as she used to be. 



182 WHAT IS COMING? 

She is not so extensively and completely married. 
Her large and increasing leisure remains in the 
problem. 

The influence of this coming body of freewomen 
upon the general social atmosphere will be, I ven- 
ture to think, liberalising and relaxing in certain 
directions and very bracing in others. This new 
type of women will want to go about freely without 
an escort, to be free to travel alone, take rooms in 
hotels, sit in restaurants, and so forth. Now, as 
the women of the past decade showed, there are for a 
woman two quite antagonistic ways of going about 
alone. Nothing showed the duplicate nature of the 
suffragist movement more than the great variety 
of deportment of women in the London streets dur- 
ing that time. There were types that dressed 
neatly and quietly and went upon their business 
with intent and preoccupied faces. Their inten- 
tion was to mingle as unobtrusively as possible into 
the stream of business, to be as far as possible for 
the ordinary purposes of traffic " men in a world 
of men." A man could speak to such women as he 
spoke to another man, without suspicion, could for 
example ask his way and be directed without being 
charged with annoying or accosting a delicate fe- 
male. At the other extreme there was a type of 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 183 

young woman who came into the streets like some- 
thing precious that has got loose. It dressed itself 
as feminine loveliness ; it carried sex like a banner 
and like a challenge. Its mind was fully prepared 
by the Pankhnrst literature for insult. It swept 
past distressed manhood imputing motives. It was 
pure hareein, and the perplexed masculine intelli- 
gence could never determine whether it was out for 
a demonstration or whether it was out for a spree. 
Its motives in thus marching across the path of 
feminine emancipation were probably more com- 
plicated and confused than that alternative sug- 
gests, and sheer vanity abounded in the mixture. 
But undoubtedly that extremity is the vanishing ex- 
tremity of these things. The new freewoman is 
going to be a grave and capable being, soberly 
dressed and imposing her own decency and neutral- 
ity of behaviour upon the men she meets. And 
along the line of sober costume and simple and re- 
strained behaviour that the freewoman is marking- 
out, the married woman will also escape to new 
measures of freedom. 

I do not believe that among women of the same 
social origins and the same educational quality 
there can exist side by side entirely distinct schools 
of costume, deportment and behaviour, based on 



184 WHAT IS COMING? 

entirely divergent views of life. I do not think that 
men can be trained to differentiate between differ- 
ent sorts of women, sorts of women they will often 
be meeting simultaneously, and to treat this one 
with frankness and fellowship and that one with 
awe and passion and romantic old-world gallantry. 
All sorts of intermediate types — the majority of 
women will be intermediate types — will compli- 
cate the problem. This conflict of the citizen- 
woman ideal with the loveliness-woman ideal, 
which was breaking out very plainly in the British 
suffrage movement before the war, will certainly 
return after the war, and I have little doubt which 
way the issue will fall. The human being is going 
to carry it against the sexual being. The struggle 
is going to be extensive and various and prolonged, 
but in the serious years ahead, the serious type will 
win. The plain well-made dress will oust the rib- 
bon and the decolletage. 

In every way the war is accelerating the emanci- 
pation of women from sexual specialisation. It is 
facilitating their economic emancipation. It is 
liberating types that will inevitably destroy both 
the " atmosphere of gallantry " which is such a bar 
to friendliness between people of opposite sexes, 
and that atmosphere of hostile distrust which is its 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 185 

counterpart in the minds of the oversexual suffra- 
gettes. It is arresting the change of fashions and 
simplifying manners. In another way also it is 
working to the same end. That fall in the birth 
rate which has been so marked a feature in the 
social development of all modern States, has become 
much more perceptible since the war began to tell 
upon domestic comfort. There is a full-cradle agi- 
tation going on in Germany to check this decline; 
German mothers are being urged not to leave the 
Crown Prince of 1930 or 1940 without the necessary 
material for glory at some fresh Battle of Verdun. 
I doubt the zeal of their response. But everywhere 
the war signifies economic stress which must nec- 
essarily continue long after the war is over, and in 
the present state of knowledge that stress means 
fewer children. The family, already light, will 
grow lighter. This means that marriage, although 
it may be by no means less emotionally sacred, will 
become a lighter thing. Once, to be married was 
a woman's whole career. Household cares, a dozen 
children, and she was consumed. All her romances 
ended in marriage. All a decent man's romance 
ended there too. She proliferated and he toiled, 
and when the married couple had brought up some 
of their children and buried the others and blessed 



186 WHAT IS COMING? 

their first grandchildren, life was over. Now to be 
married is an incident in a woman's career as in a 
man's. There is not the same necessity of that 
household, not the same close tie; the married 
woman remains partially a freewoman and assimi- 
lates herself to the freewoman. There is an in- 
creasing disposition to group solitary children and 
to delegate their care to specially qualified people, 
and this is likely to increase because the high earn- 
ing power of young women will incline them to 
entrust their children to others and because a short- 
age of men and an excess of widows will supply 
other women willing to undertake that care. The 
more foolish women will take these releases as a 
release into levity, but the commonsense of the 
newer types of women will come to the help of men 
in recognising the intolerable nuisance of this pro- 
longation of flirting and charming on the part of 
people who have had what should be a satisfying 
love. And there will be not much wealth or super- 
fluity to make levity possible and desirable. Win- 
some weak womanhood will be told bluntly by men 
and women alike that it is a bore. The frou-frou 
of skirts, the delicate mysteries of the toilette, will 
cease to thrill any but the very young men. Mar- 
riage, deprived of its bonds of material necessity, 



WHAT WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 187 

will demand a closer and closer companionship as 
its justification and excuse. A marriage that does 
not ripen into a close personal friendship between 
two equals, will be regarded with increasing def- 
initeness as an unsatisfactory marriage. 

These things are not stated here as being desir- 
able or undesirable. This is merely an attempt to 
estimate the drift and tendency of the time as it 
has been accentuated by the war. It works out to 
the realisation that marriage is likely to count for 
less and less as a state and for more and more as 
a personal relationship. It is likely to be an affair 
of diminishing public and increasing private im- 
portance. People who marry are likely to remain, 
so far as practical ends go, more detached and 
separable. The essential link will be the love and 
affection and not the home. 

With that go certain logical consequences. The 
first is that the circumstances of the unmarried 
mother will resemble more than they have hitherto 
done those of many married mothers; the harsh 
lines once drawn between them will dissolve. This 
will fall in with the long manifest tendency in 
modern society to lighten the disadvantages (in 
the case of legacy duties, for example) and stigma 
laid upon illegitimate children. And a type of 



188 WHAT IS COMING? 

marriage where personal compatibility has come to 
be esteemed the fundamental thing, will be alto- 
gether more amenable to divorce than the old union 
which was based upon the kitchen and the nursery, 
and the absence of any care, education, or security 
for children beyond the range of the parental 
household. Marriage will not only be lighter but 
more dissoluble. . . . 

To summarise all that has gone before : this war 
is accelerating rather than deflecting the stream of 
tendency, and is bringing us rapidly to a state of 
affairs in which women will be much more definitely 
independent of their sexual status, much less ham- 
pered in their self-development, and much more 
nearly equal to men, than has ever been known be- 
fore in the whole history of mankind. . . . 



IX 

THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 

§ 1 

In this chapter it is proposed to embark upon what 
may seem now, with the Great War still in prog- 
ress and still undecided, the most hopeless of all 
prophetic adventures. This is to speculate upon 
the redrawing of the map of Europe after the war. 
But because the detailed happenings and exact cir- 
cumstances of the ending of the war are uncertain, 
they need not alter the inevitable broad conclusion. 
I have already discussed that conclusion, and 
pointed out that the war has become essentially a 
war of mutual exhaustion. This does not mean, 
as some hasty readers may assume, that I foretell 
a " draw." We may be all white and staggering, 
but Germany is, I believe, fated to go down first. 
She will make the first advances towards peace; 
she will ultimately admit defeat. 

But I do want to insist that by that time every 
belligerent, and not simply Germany, will be ex- 
hausted to a pitch of extreme reasonableness. 

189 



190 WHAT IS COMING? 

There will be no power left as Germany was left in 
1871, in a state of " freshness " and a dictatorial 
attitude. That is to say they will all be gravitat- 
ing, not to triumphs, but to such a settlement as 
seems to promise the maximum of equilibrium in 
the future. 

If towards the end of the war the United States 
should decide, after all, to abandon their pres- 
ent attitude of superior comment and throw their 
weight in favour of such a settlement as would 
make the recrudescence of militarism impossible, 
the general exhaustion may give America a rela- 
tive importance far beyond any influence she could 
exert at the present time. In the end, America 
may have the power to insist upon almost vital 
conditions in the settlement; though whether she 
will have the imaginative force and will is, of 
course, quite another question. 

And before I go on to speculate about the ac- 
tual settlement, there are one or two generalisa- 
tions that it may be interesting to try over. Law 
is a thin wash that we paint over the firm outlines 
of reality, and the treaties and agreements of 
emperors and kings and statesmen have little of 
the permanence of certain more fundamental 
human realities. I was looking the other day at 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 191 

Sir Mark Sykes' The Caliph's Inheritance, which 
contains a series of coloured maps of the political 
boundaries of southwestern Asia for the last three 
thousand years. The shapes and colours come and 
go — now it is Persia, now it is Macedonia, now the 
Eastern Empire, now the Arab, now the Turk who 
is ascendent. The colours change as if they were 
in a kaleidoscope ; they advance, recede, split, van- 
ish. But through all that time there exists ob- 
stinately an Armenia, an essential Persia, an 
Arabia ; they, too, advance or recede a little. I do 
not claim that they are eternal things, but they 
are far more permanent things than any rulers or 
empires; they are rooted to the ground by a peas- 
antry, by a physical and temperamental attitude. 
Apart from political maps of mankind, there are 
natural maps of mankind. I find it, too, in Eu- 
rope ; the monarchs splash the water and break up 
the mirror in endless strange shapes; nevertheless, 
always it is tending back to its enduring forms ; al- 
ways it is gravitating back to a Spain, to a Gaul, 
to an Italy, to a Serbo-Croatia, to a Bulgaria, to a 
Germany, to a Poland. Poland and Armenia and 
Egypt destroyed, subjugated, invincible, I would 
take as typical of what I mean by the natural map 
of mankind. 



192 WHAT IS COMING? 

Let me repeat again that I do not assert there is 
an eternal map. It does change; there have been 
times — the European settlement of America and 
Siberia, for example, the Arabic sweep across North 
Africa, the invasion of Britain by the Low German 
peoples — when it has changed very considerably 
in a century or so ; but at its swiftest it still takes 
generations to change. The gentlemen who used 
to sit in conferences and diets, and divide up the 
world ever and again before the nineteenth century, 
never realised this. It is only within the last hun- 
dred years that mankind has begun to grasp the 
fact that one of the first laws of political stability 
is to draw your political boundaries along the lines 
of the natural map of mankind. 

Now the nineteenth century phrased this concep- 
tion by talking about the " principle of national- 
ity." Such interesting survivals of the nineteenth 
century as Mr. C. K. Buxton still talk of settling 
human affairs by that " principle." But unhappily 
for him the world is not so simply divided. There 
are tribal regions with no national sense. There 
are extensive regions of the earth's surface where 
the population is not homogeneous, where people 
of different languages or different incompatible 
creeds live village against village, a kind of human 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 193 

emulsion, incapable of any true mixture or unity. 
Consider, for example, Central Africa, Tyrone, 
Albania, Bombay, Constantinople or Transylvania. 
Here are regions and cities with either no national- 
ity or with as much nationality as a patchwork 
quilt has colour. . . . 

Now, so far as the homogeneous regions of the 
world go, I am quite prepared to sustain the thesis 
that they can only be tranquil, they can only de- 
velop their possibilities freely and be harmless to 
their neighbours, when they are governed by local 
men, by men of the local race, religion and tradi- 
tion, and with a form of government that, unlike 
a monarchy or a plutocracy, does not crystallise 
commercial or national ambition. So far I go with 
those who would appeal to the " principle of nation- 
ality." But I would stipulate further that it 
would enormously increase the stability of the ar- 
rangement if such " nations " could be grouped to- 
gether into " United States " wherever there were 
possibilities of inter-state rivalries and commercial 
friction. Where, however, one deals with a region 
of mixed nationality, there is need of a subtler sys- 
tem of adjustments. Such a system has already 
been worked out in the case of Switzerland, where 
we have the community not in countries but can- 



194 WHAT IS COMING? 

tons, each with its own religion, its culture and 
self-government, and all at peace under a polyglot 
and impartial common government. It is as plain 
as daylight to any one who is not blinded by pa- 
triotic or private interest that such a country as 
Albania, which is mono-lingual indeed, but hope- 
lessly divided religiously, will never be tranquil, 
never contented, unless it is under a cantonal sys- 
tem, and that the only solution of the Irish diffi- 
culty along the belt between Ulster and Catholic 
Ireland lies in the same arrangement. And then, 
thirdly, there are the regions and cities of no na- 
tionality, such as Constantinople or Bombay, which 
manifestly appertain not to one nation, but many ; 
the former to all the Black Sea nations, the latter 
to all India. Disregarding ambitions and tradi- 
tions, it is fairly obvious that such international 
places would be best under the joint control of, and 
form a basis of union between, all the peoples af- 
fected. 

Now it is suggested here that upon these three- 
fold lines it is possible to work out a map of the 
world of maximum contentment and stability, and 
that there will be a gravitation of all other ar- 
rangements, all empires and leagues and what not, 
towards this rational and natural map of mankind. 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 195 

This does not imply that that map will ultimately 
assert itself, but that it will always be tending to 
assert itself. It will obsess ostensible politics. I 
do not know with any degree of certainty what 
peculiar forms of muddle and aggression may not 
record themselves upon the maps of 2200 ; I do not 
certainly know whether mankind will be better off 
or worse off then, more or less civilised; but I do 
know, with a very considerable degree of certainty, 
that in a.d. 2200 there will still be a France, an 
Ireland, a Germany, a Jugo-Slav region, a Con- 
stantinople, a Raj pu tana, and a Bengal. I do not 
mean that these are absolutely fixed things; they 
may have receded or expanded. But these are the 
more permanent things; these are the field, the 
groundwork, the basic reality; these are funda- 
mental forces over which play the ambitions, 
treacheries, delusions, traditions, tyrannies of in- 
ternational politics. All boundaries will tend to 
reveal these fundamental forms as all clothing 
tends to reveal the body. You may hide the waist ; 
you will only reveal the shoulders the more. You 
may mask, you may muffle the body ; it is still alive 
inside, and the ultimate determining thing. And, 
having premised this much, it is possible to take 
up the problem of the peace of 1917 or 1918, or 



196 WHAT IS COMING? 

whenever it is to be, with some sense of its limita- 
tions and superficiality. 

§ 2 
We have already hazarded the prophecy that 
after a long war of general exhaustion Germany 
will be the first to realise defeat. This does not 
mean that she will surrender unconditionally, but 
that she will be reduced to bargaining to see how 
much she must surrender, and what she may hold. 
It is my impression that she will be deserted by 
Bulgaria, and that Turkey will be out of the fight- 
ing before the end. But these are chancy matters. 
Against Germany there will certainly be the three 
great Allies, France, Russia and Britain, and al- 
most certainly Japan will be with them. The four 
will probably have got to a very complete and de- 
tailed understanding among themselves. Italy — 
in, I fear, a slightly detached spirit — will sit at the 
board. Hungary will be present, sitting, so to 
speak, amidst the decayed remains of Austria. 
Roumania, a little out of breath through hurrying 
at the last, may be present as the latest ally of 
Italy. The European neutrals will be at least 
present in spirit ; their desires will be acutely felt ; 
but it is doubtful if the United States will count 
for all that they might in the decision. Such 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 197 

weight as America chooses to exercise — would that 
she would choose to exercise more ! — will prob- 
ably be on the side of the rational and natural 
settlement of the world. 

Now the most important thing of all at this 
settlement will be the temper and nature of the 
Germany with which the Allies will be dealing. 

Let us not be blinded by the passions of war 
into confusing a people with its government and 
the artificial Kultur of a brief century. There is 
a Germany, great and civilised, a decent and ad- 
mirable people, masked by Imperialism, blinded by 
the vanity of the easy victories of half a century 
ago, wrapped in illusion. How far will she be 
chastened and disillusioned by the end of this war? 

The terms of peace depend enormously upon the 
answer to that question. If we take the extremest 
possibility, and suppose a revolution in Germany 
or in South Germany, and the replacement of the 
Hohenzollerns in all or part of Germany by a 
Republic, then I am convinced that for republican 
Germany there would be not simply forgiveness, 
but a warm welcome back to the comity of nations. 
The French, British, Belgians and Italians, and 
every civilised force in Russia, would tumble over 
one another in their eager greeting of this return 



198 WHAT IS COMING? 

to sanity. If we suppose a less extreme but more 
possible revolution, taking the form of an inquiry 
into the sanity of the Kaiser and his eldest son, and 
the establishment of constitutional safeguards for 
the future, that also would bring about an extraor- 
dinary modification of the resolution of the Pledged 
Allies. But no ending to this war, no sort of 
settlement, will destroy the antipathy of the 
civilised peoples for the violent, pretentious, senti- 
mental and cowardly imperialism that has so far 
dominated Germany. All Europe outside Ger- 
many now hates and dreads the Hohenzollerns. 
No treaty of peace can end that hate, and so long 
as Germany sees fit to identify herself with 
Hohenzollern dreams of empire and a warfare of 
massacre and assassination, there must be war 
henceforth, open, or but thinly masked, against 
Germany. It will be but the elementary common 
sense of the situation for all the Allies to plan 
tariffs, exclusions, special laws against German 
shipping and shareholders and immigrants so long 
as every German remains a potential servant of 
that system. Whatever Germany may think of the 
Hohenzollerns, the world outside Germany regards 
them as the embodiment of homicidal nationalism. 
And the settlement of Europe after the war, if it 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 199 

is to be a settlement with the Hohenzollerns and 
not with the German people, must include the vir- 
tual disarming of those robber murderers against 
any renewal of their attack. It would be the most 
obvious folly to stop anywhere short of that. With 
Germany we would welcome peace to-morrow; we 
would welcome her shipping on the seas and her 
flag about the world; against the Hohenzollerns 
it must obviously be war to the bitter end. 

But the ultimate of all sane European policy, 
as distinguished from oligarchic and dynastic fool- 
ery, is the establishment of the natural map of 
Europe. There exists no school of thought that 
can claim a moment's consideration among the 
Allies, which aims at the disintegration of the 
essential Germany or the subjugation of any Ger- 
mans to an alien rule. Nor does any one grudge 
Germany wealth, trade, shipping, or anything else 
that goes with the politician's phrase of "legiti- 
mate expansion " for its own sake. If we do now 
set our minds to deprive Germany of these things 
in their fulness, it is in exactly the same spirit as 
that in which one might remove that legitimate and 
peaceful implement, a bread knife, from the hand of 
a homicidal maniac. Let but Germany cure her- 
self of her Hohenzollern taint, and the world will 



200 WHAT IS COMING? 

grudge her wealth and economic pre-eminence as 
little as it grudges wealth and economic pre-emi- 
nence to the United States. 

Now the probabilities of a German revolution 
open questions too complex and subtle for our pres- 
ent speculation. I would merely remark in pass- 
ing that in Great Britain at least those possibili- 
ties seem to me to be enormously underrated. For 
our present purpose it will be most convenient to 
indicate a sort of maximum and minimum, depend- 
ing upon the decision of Germany to be entirely 
Hohenzollern or wholly or in part European. But 
in either case we are going to assume that it is 
Germany which has been most exhausted by the 
war, and which is seeking peace from the Allies, 
who have also, we w T ill assume, excellent internal 
reasons for desiring it. With the Hohenzollerns 
it is nonsense to dream of any enduring peace, but 
whether we are making a lasting and friendly peace 
with Germany or merely a sort of truce of military 
operations that will be no truce in the economic 
war against Hohenzollern resources, the same es- 
sential idea will, I think, guide all the peace-desir- 
ing Powers. They will try to draw the boundaries 
as near as they can to those of the natural map of 
mankind. 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 201 

Then, writing as an Englishman, my first thought 
of the European map is naturally of Belgium. 
Only absolute smashing defeat could force either 
Britain or France to consent to anything short of 
the complete restoration of Belgium. Rather than 
give that consent they will both carry the war to 
at present undreamt-of extremities. Belgium must 
be restored; her neutrality must be replaced by a 
defensive alliance with her two Western Allies, 
and if the world has still to reckon with Hohenzol- 
lerns, then her frontier must be thrust forward 
into the adjacent French-speaking country so as to 
minimise the chances of any second surprise. It 
is manifest that every frontier that gives upon the 
Hohenzollerns must henceforth be entrenched line 
behind line, and held permanently by a garrison 
ready for any treachery, and it becomes of primary 
importance that the Franco-Belgian line should be 
as short and strong as possible. Aix, which Ger- 
many has made a mere jumping-off place for ag- 
gressions, should clearly be held by Belgium 
against a Hohenzollern Empire, and the fortified 
and fiscal frontier would run from it southward to 
include the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, with its 
French sympathies and traditions, in the perma- 
nent alliance. It is quite impossible to leave this 



202 WHAT IS COMING? 

ambiguous territory as it was before the war, with 
its railway in German hands and its postal and 
telegraphic service (since 1913) under Hohenzol- 
lern control. It is quite impossible to hand over 
this strongly anti-Prussian population to Hohen- 
zollern masters. 

But an Englishman must needs write with diffi- 
dence upon this question of the Western bound- 
ary. It is clear that all the boundaries of 1914 
from Aix to Basel are a part of ancient history. 
No " as you were " is possible there. And it is not 
the business of any one in Great Britain to redraw 
them. That task on our side lies between France 
and Belgium. The business of Great Britain in 
the matter is as plain as daylight. It is to support 
to her last man and her last ounce of gold those 
new boundaries her Allies consider essential to 
their comfort and security. But I do not see how 
France, unless she is really convinced she is beaten, 
can content herself with anything less than a 
strong Franco-Belgian frontier from Aix, that will 
take in at least Metz and Saarburg. She knows 
best the psychology of the lost provinces, and what 
amount of annexation will spell weakness or 
strength. If she demands all Alsace-Lorraine back 
from the Hohenzollerns, British opinion is resolved 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 203 

to support her, and to go through with this struggle 
until she gets it. To guess at the direction of the 
new line is not to express a British opinion, but to 
speculate upon the opinion of France. After the 
experience of Luxembourg and Belgium no one now 
dreams of a neutralised buffer State. What does 
not become French or Belgian of the Rhineland will 
remain German — forever. That is perhaps con- 
ceivable, for example, of Strassburg and the low- 
lying parts of Alsace. I do not know. 

It is conceivable, but I do not think that it is 
probable. I think the probability lies in the other 
direction. This war of exhaustion may be going 
on for a year or so more, but the end will be the 
thrusting in of the too extended German lines. 
The longer and bloodier the job is, the grimmer 
will be the determination of the Pledged Allies to 
exact a recompense. If the Germans offer peace 
while they still hold some part of Belgium, there 
will be dealings. If they wait until the French are 
in the Palatinate, then I doubt if the French will 
consent to go again. There will be no possible ad- 
vantage to Germany in a war of resistance once the 
scale of her fortunes begins to sink. . . . 

It is when we turn to the east of Germany that 
the map-drawing becomes really animated. Here 



204 WHAT IS COMING? 

is the region of great decisions. The natural map 
shows a line of obstinately non-German communi- 
ties, stretching nearly from the Baltic to the Adri- 
atic. There are Poland, Bohemia (with her kin- 
dred Slovaks), the Magyars, and the Jugo-Serbs. 
In a second line come the Great and Little Rus- 
sians, the Roumanians, and the Bulgarians. And 
here both Great Britain and France must defer to 
the wishes of their two Allies, Russia and Italy. 
Neither of these countries has expressed inflexible 
intentions, and the situation has none of the in- 
evitable quality of the Western line. Except for 
the Tsar's promise of autonomy to Poland, nothing 
has been promised. On the Western line there are 
only two possibilities that I can see : the Aix-Bale 
boundary, or the sickness and death of France. 
On the Eastern line nothing is fated. There seems 
to be enormous scope for bargaining over all this 
field, and here it is that the chances. of compensa- 
tions and consolations for Germany are to be found. 
Let us first consider the case for Poland. The 
way to a reunited Poland seems to me a particu- 
larly difficult one. The perplexity arises out of 
the crime of the original partition; whichever side 
emerges with an effect of victory must needs give 
up territory if an autonomous Poland is to reap- 



THE NEW MAP OF EUKOPE 205 

pear. A victorious Germany would probably re- 
constitute the Duchy of Warsaw under a German 
prince; an entirely victorious Kussia would prob- 
ably rejoin Posen to Eussian Poland and the Polish 
fragment of Galicia, and create a dependent Polish 
kingdom under the Tsar. Neither project would be 
received with unstinted delight by the Poles, but 
either would probably be acceptable to a certain 
section of them. Disregarding the dim feelings of 
the peasantry, Austrian Poland would probably be 
the most willing to retain a connection with its old 
rulers. The Habsburgs have least estranged the 
Poles. It is the only section of Poland which has 
been at all reconciled to foreign control; it is the 
most autonomous and contented of the fragments. 
It is doubtful how far national unanimity is any 
longer possible between the three Polish fragments. 
Like most English writers, I receive a considerable 
amount of printed matter from various schools of 
Polish patriotism, and wide divergences of spirit 
and intention appear. A weak, divided and politi- 
cally isolated Poland of twelve or fifteen million 
people, under some puppet adventurer king set up 
between the Hohenzollerns and the Tsardom, does 
not promise much happiness for the Poles or much 
security for the peace of the world. An entirely 



206 WHAT IS COMING? 

independent Poland will be a feverish field of in- 
ternational intrigue — intrigue to which the fatal 
Polish temperament lends itself all too readily ; it 
may be a battlefield again within five-and-twenty 
years. I think, if I were a patriotic Pole, I should 
determine to be a Slav at any cost, and make the 
best of Russia; ally myself with all her liberal 
tendencies, and rise or fall with her. And I should 
do my utmost in a field where at present too little 
has been done to establish understandings and lay 
the foundations of a future alliance with the 
Czech-Slovak community to the south. But, then, 
I am not a Pole, but a Western European with a 
strong liking for the Russians. I am democratic 
and scientific, and the Poles I have met are Catholic 
and aristocratic and romantic, and all sorts of 
difficult things that must make co-operation with 
them on the part of Russians, Ruthenian peasants, 
Czechs, and, indeed, other Poles, slow and inse- 
cure. I doubt if either Germany or Russia wants 
to incorporate more Poles — Russia more particu- 
larly, which has all Siberia over which to breed 
Russians — and I am inclined to think that there is 
a probability that the end of this war may find 
Poland still divided, and with boundary lines rim- 
ing across her not materially different from those of 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 207 

1914. That is, I think, an undesirable probability, 
but until the Polish mind qualifies its desire for 
absolute independence with a determination to 
orient itself definitely to some larger political mass, 
it remains one that has to be considered. 

But the future of Poland is not really separate 
from that of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, nor 
is that again to be dealt with apart from that of 
the Balkans. From Danzig to the Morea there 
runs across Europe a series of distinctive peoples, 
each too intensely different and national to be ab- 
sorbed and assimilated by either of their greater 
neighbours, Germany or Russia, and each relatively 
too small to stand securely alone. None have 
shaken themselves free from monarchical tradi- 
tions; each may become an easy prey to dynastic 
follies and the aggressive obsessions of diplomacy. 
Centuries of bloody rearrangement may lie before 
this East Central belt of Europe. To the liberal 
idealist the thought of a possible Swiss system or 
group of Swiss systems comes readily to mind. 
One thinks of a grouping of groups of Republics, 
building up a United States of Eastern Europe. 
But neither Hohenzollerns nor Tsar would wel- 
come that. The arm of democratic France is not 
long enough to reach to help forward such a de- 



208 WHAT IS COMING? 

velopment, and Great Britain is never sure whether 
she is a " Crowned Republic " or a Germanic mon- 
archy. Hitherto in the Balkans she has lent her 
influence chiefly to setting up those treacherous 
little German kings who have rewarded her so ill. 
The national monarchs of Serbia and Montenegro 
have alone kept faith with civilisation. I doubt, 
however, if Great Britain will go on with that dy- 
nastic policy. She herself is upon the eve of pro- 
found changes of spirit and internal organisation. 
But whenever one thinks of the possibilities of Re- 
publican development in Europe as an outcome of 
this war, it is to realise the disastrous indifference 
of America to the essentials of the European situa- 
tion. The United States of America could exert an 
enormous influence at the close of the war in the 
direction of a liberal settlement and of liberal in- 
stitutions. . . . They will, I fear, do nothing of the 
sort. 

It is here that the possibility of some internal 
change in Germany becomes of such supreme im- 
portance. The Hohenzollern Imperialism towers 
like the black threat of a new Caesarism over all the 
world. It may tower for some centuries; it may 
vanish to-morrow. A German revolution may de- 
stroy it; a small group of lunacy commissioners 



THE NEW ,MAP OF EUROPE 209 

may fold it up and put it away. But should it go, 
it would at least take with it nearly every crown 
between Hamburg and Constantinople. The Ger- 
man kings would vanish like a wisp of smoke. 
Suppose a German revolution and a correlated step 
forward towards liberal institutions on the part 
of Russia, then the whole stage of Eastern Europe 
would clear as fever goes out of a man. This age 
of international elbowing and jostling, of intrigue 
and diplomacy, of wars, massacres, deportations 
en masse, and the continual fluctuation of irra- 
tional boundaries would come to an end forth- 
with. 

So sweeping a change is the extreme possibility. 
The probability is of something less lucid and more 
prosaic ; of a discussion of diplomatists ; of patched 
arrangements. But even under these circum- 
stances, the whole Eastern European situation is 
so fluid and little controlled by any plain necessity 
that there will be enormous scope for any individ- 
ual statesman of imagination and force of will. 
There have recently been revelations, more or less 
trustworthy, of German schemes for a rearrange- 
ment of Eastern Europe. They implied a German 
victory. Bohemia, Poland, Galicia and Ruthenia 
were to make a Habsburg-ruled State from the Bal- 



210 WHAT IS COMING? 

tic to the Black Sea. The Jugo-Slav and the Mag- 
yar were to be linked (uneasy bedfellows) into a 
second kingdom, also Habsburg ruled ; Austria was 
to come into the German Empire as a third Habs- 
burg dukedom or kingdom; Roumania, Bulgaria 
and Greece were to continue as independent 
Powers, German ruled. Recently German propos- 
als published in America have shown a disposition 
to admit the claims of Roumania to the Wallachian 
districts of Transylvania. Evidently the urgent 
need to create kingdoms or confederations larger 
than any such single States as the natural map 
supplies is manifest to both sides. If Germany, 
Italy and Russia can come to any sort of general 
agreement in these matters, their arrangements 
will be a matter of secondary importance to the 
Western Allies — saving our duty to Serbia and 
Montenegro, and their rulers. Russia may not find 
the German idea of a Polish plus Bohemian border 
State so very distasteful, provided that the ruler 
is not a German ; Germany may find the idea still 
tolerable if the ruler is not the Tsar. The destiny 
of the Serbo-Croatian future lies largely in the 
hands of Italy and Bulgaria. Bulgaria was not 
in this war at the beginning, and she may not be 
in it at the end. Her King is neither immortal nor 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 211 

irreplaceable. Her desire now must be largely to 
retain her winnings in Macedonia, and keep the 
frontier posts of a too embracing Germany as far 
off as possible. She has nothing to gain and much 
to fear from Roumania and Greece. Her present 
relations with Turkey are unnatural. She has 
everything to gain from a prompt recovery of the 
friendship of Italy and the sea Powers. A friendly 
Serbo-Croatian buffer State against Germany will 
probably be of equal comfort in the future to Italy 
and Bulgaria; more especially if Italy has pushed 
down the Adriatic coast along the line of the former 
Venetian possessions. Serbia has been overrun, 
but never were the convergent forces of adjacent 
interests so clearly in favour of her recuperation. 
The possibility of Italy and that strange Latin 
outlier, Roumania, joining hands through an allied 
and friendly Serbia must be very present in Italian 
thought. The allied conception of the land route 
from the West and America to Bagdad and India 
is by Mont Cenis, Trieste, Serbia and Constanti- 
nople, as their North European line to India is 
through Russia by Baku. 

And that brings us to Constantinople. Constan- 
tinople is not a national city ; it is now, and it has 
always been, an artificial cosmopolis, and Con- 



212 WHAT IS COMING? 

stantinople and the Dardanelles are essentially the 
gate of the Black Sea. It is to Russia that the 
waterway is of supreme importance. Any other 
Power upon it can strangle Russia ; Russia, posses- 
sing it, is capable of very little harm to any other 
country. Roumania is the next most interested 
country. But Roumania can reach up the Danube 
and through Bulgaria, Serbia or Hungary to the 
outer world. Her greatest trade will always be 
with Central Europe. For generations the Turks 
held Thrace and Anatolia before they secured Con- 
stantinople. The Turk can exist without Constan- 
tinople; he is at his best outside Constantinople; 
the fall of Constantinople was the beginning of his 
decay. He sat down there and corrupted. His 
career was at an end. I confess that I find a bias 
in my mind for a Russian ownership of Constan- 
tinople. I think that if she does not get it now her 
gravitation towards it in the future will be so great 
as to cause fresh wars. Somewhere she must get 
to open sea, and if it is not through Constantinople 
then her line must lie either through a dependent 
Armenia thrust down to the coast of the Levant 
or, least probable and least desirable of all, through 
the Persian Gulf. The Constantinople route is the 
most natural and least controversial of these. 



THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 213 

With the dwindling of the Turkish power, the 
Turks at Constantinople become more and more 
like robber knights levying toll at the pass. I 
can imagine Russia making enormous concessions 
in Poland, for example, accepting retrocessions, 
and conceding autonomy, rather than foregoing 
her ancient destiny upon the Bosphorus. I be- 
lieve she w T ill fight on along the Black Sea coast 
until she gets there. This, I think, is her funda- 
mental end, without which no peace is worth hav- 
ing, as the liberation of Belgium and the satis- 
faction of France is the fundamental end of Great 
Britain, and Trieste-Fiume is the fundamental end 
of Italy. But for all the land between Constanti- 
nople and West Prussia there are no absolutely 
fundamental ends ; that is the land of quid pro quo; 
that is where the dealing will be done. Serbia 
must be restored and the Croats liberated; sooner 
or later the South Slav State will insist upon itself ; 
but, except for that, I see no impossibility in the 
German dream of three kingdoms to take the place 
of Austria-Hungary, nor even in a southward exten- 
sion of the Hohenzollern Empire to embrace the 
German one of the three. If the Austrians have a 
passion for Prussian " Kultur," it is not for us to 
restrain it. Austrian, Saxon, Bavarian, Hanover- 



214 WHAT IS COMING? 

ian, and Prussian must adjust their own differ- 
ences. 

Hungary would be naturally Habsburg; is, in 
fact, now essentially Habsburg, more Habsburg 
than Austria, and essentially anti-Slav. Her grav- 
itation to the Central Powers seems inevitable. 
Whether the Polish-Czech combination would be a 
Habsburg kingdom at all is another matter. Only 
if, after all, the Allies are far less successful than 
they have now every reason to hope would that be- 
come possible. The gravitation of that West Slav 
state to the Central European system or to Russia 
will, I think, be the only real measure of ultimate 
success or failure in this war. I think it narrows 
down to that so far as Europe is concerned. Most 
of the other things are inevitable. Such, it seems 
to me, is the most open possibility in the European 
map in the years immediately before us. If by 
dying I could end the Hohenzollern Empire to- 
morrow I would gladly do it. But I have, as a bal- 
ancing prophet, to face the high probability of its 
outliving me for some generations. It is to me a 
deplorable probability. Far rather would I antici- 
pate Germany quit of her eagles and Hohenzollerns, 
and ready to take her place as the leading Power of 
the United States of Europe. 



THE UNITED STATES, FRANCE, BRITAIN, 
AND RUSSIA 

§ 1 
In this chapter I propose to speculate a little about 
the future development of these four great States, 
whose destinies are likely to be much more closely 
interwoven than their past histories have been. I 
believe that the stars in their courses tend to draw 
these States together into a dominant peace al- 
liance, maintaining the peace of the world. There 
may be other stars in that constellation, Italy, 
Japan, a confederated Latin America, for example ; 
I do not propose to deal with that possibility now, 
but only to dwell upon the development of under- 
standings and common aims between France, 
Russia, and the English-speaking States. 

They have all shared one common experience dur- 
ing the last two years ; they have had an enormous 
loss of self -sufficiency. This has been particularly 
the case with the United States of America. At 
the beginning of this war, the United States were 

215 



216 WHAT IS COMING? 

still possessed by the glorious illusion that they 
were aloof from general international politics, that 
they needed no allies and need fear no enemies, that 
they constituted a sort of asylum from war and all 
the bitter stresses and hostilities of the old world. 
Themselves secure, they could intervene with grim 
resolution to protect their citizens all over the 
world. Had they not bombarded Algiers? . . . 

I remember that soon after the outbreak of the 
war I lunched at the Savoy Hotel in London when 
it was crammed with Americans suddenly swept 
out of Europe by the storm. My host happened 
to be a man of some diplomatic standing, and sev- 
eral of them came and talked to him. They were 
full of these old-world ideas of American immunity. 
Their indignation was comical even at the time. 
Some of them had been hustled ; some had lost their 
luggage in Germany. When, they asked, was it to 
be returned to them? Some seemed to be under 
the impression that, war or no war, an American 
tourist had a perfect right to travel about in the 
Vosges or up and down the Rhine just as he thought 
fit. They thought he had just to wave a little 
American flag, and the referee w T ould blow a whistle 
and hold up the battle until he had got by safely. 
One family had actually been careering about in 



THE UNITED STATES 217 

a cart — their automobile seized — between the 
closing lines of French and Germans, brightly una- 
ware of the disrespect of bursting shells for Ameri- 
can nationality. . . . Since those days the Ameri- 
can nation has lived politically a hundred years. 

The people of the United States have shed their 
delusion that there is an Eastern and a Western 
hemisphere, and that nothing can ever pass between 
them but immigrants and tourists and trade, and 
realised that this world is one round globe that gets 
smaller and smaller every decade if you measure 
it by day's journeys. They are only going over the 
lesson the British have learnt in the last score or 
so of years. This is one world and bayonets are a 
crop that spreads. Let them gather and seed, it 
matters not how far from you, and a time will come 
when they will be sticking up under your nose. 
There is no real peace but the peace of the whole 
world, and that is only to be kept by the whole 
world resisting and suppressing aggression wher- 
ever it arises. To any one who watches the Ameri- 
can Press, this realisation has been more and more 
manifest. From dreams of aloofness and ineffable 
superiority, America comes round very rapidly to 
a conception of an active participation in the diffi- 
cult business of statescraft. She is thinking of 



218 WHAT IS COMING? 

alliances, of throwing her weight and influence 
upon the side of law and security. No longer a 
political Thoreau in the woods, a sort of vegetarian 
recluse among nations, a being of negative virtues 
and unpremeditated superiorities, she girds herself 
for a manly part in the toilsome world of men. 

So far as I can judge the American mind is emi- 
nently free from any sentimental leaning towards 
the British. Americans have a traditional hatred 
of the Hanoverian monarchy, and a democratic dis- 
belief in autocracy. They are far more acutely 
aware of differences than resemblances. They 
suspect every Englishman of being a bit of a gen- 
tleman and a bit of a flunkey. I have never found 
in America anything like that feeling common in 
the mass of English people that prevents the use of 
the word " foreigner " for an American ; there is 
nothing to reciprocate the sympathy and pride that 
English and Irish republicans and radicals feel for 
the States. Few Americans realise that there are 
such beings as English republicans. What has 
linked them with the British hitherto has been 
very largely the common language and literature; 
it is only since the war began that there seems to 
have been any appreciable development of frater- 
nal feeling. And that has been not so much dis- 



THE UNITED STATES 219 

covery of a mutual affection as the realisation of a 
far closer community of essential thought and pur- 
pose than has hitherto been suspected. The Ameri- 
cans, after thinking the matter out with great 
frankness and vigour, do believe that Britain is on 
the whole fighting against aggression and not for 
profit, that she is honestly backing France and 
Belgium against an intolerable attack, and that the 
Hohenzollern Empire is a thing that needs dis- 
crediting and, if possible, destroying in the inter- 
ests of all humanity, Germany included. And they 
find that, allowing for their greater nearness, the 
British are thinking about these things almost ex- 
actly as Americans think about them. They follow 
the phases of the war in Great Britain, the strain, 
the blunderings, the tenacity, the onset of conscrip- 
tion in an essentially non-military community, with 
the complete understanding of a people similarly 
circumstanced, differing only by scale and distance. 
They have been through something of the sort al- 
ready ; they may have something of the sort happen 
again. It had not occurred to them hitherto how 
parallel we were. They begin to have inklings of 
how much more parallel we may presently become. 
There is evidence of a real search for American 
affinities among the other peoples of the world; it 



220 WHAT IS COMING? 

is a new war-made feature of the thoughtful litera- 
ture and journalism of America. And it is inter- 
esting to note how partial and divided these affini- 
ties must necessarily be. Historically and politi- 
cally the citizen of the United States must be drawn 
most closely to France. France is the one other 
successful modern republic ; she was the instigator 
and friend of American liberation. With Great 
Britain the tie of language, the tradition of personal 
freedom, and the strain in the blood, are powerful 
links. But both France and Britain are old coun- 
tries, thickly populated, with a great and ancient 
finish and completeness, full of implicit relation- 
ships; America is by comparison crude, unin- 
formed, explicit, a new country, still turning fresh 
soil, still turning over but half-explored natural re- 
sources. The United States constitute a modern 
country, a country on an unprecedented scale, be- 
ing organised from the very beginning on modern 
lines. There is only one other such country upon 
the planet, and that curiously enough is parallel 
in climate, size, and position : Kussia in Asia. 
Even Russia in Europe belongs rather to the new- 
ness that is American than to the tradition that is 
European ; Harvard was founded more than half a 
century before Petrograd. And when I looked out 



THE UNITED STATES 221 

of the train window on my way to Petrograd from 
Germany, the little towns I saw were like no Eu- 
ropean towns I had ever seen. The wooden houses, 
the broad unmade roads, the traffic, the winter-bit- 
ten scenery, a sort of untidy spaciousness, took my 
mind instantly to the country one sees in the back 
part of New York State as one goes from Boston to 
Niagara. And the reality follows the appearance. 
The United States and Russia are the west and the 
east of the same thing; they are great modern 
States, developing from the beginning upon a scale 
that only railways make possible. France and 
Britain may perish in the next two centuries or they 
may persist, but there can be no doubt that two 
centuries ahead Russia and the United States will 
be two of the greatest masses of fairly homogeneous 
population on the globe. 

There are no countries with whom the people of 
the United States are so likely to develop sympa- 
thy and a sense of common values and common in- 
terests as with these three, unless it be with the 
Scandinavian peoples. The Scandinavian peoples 
have developed a tendency to an extra-European 
outlook, to look west and east rather than south- 
wardly, to be pacifist and progressive in a manner 
essentially American. From any close sympathy 



222 WHAT IS COMING? 

with Germany the Americans are cut off at present 
by the Hohenzollerns and the system of ideas that 
the Hohenzollerns have imposed npon German 
thought. So long as the Germans cling to the 
tawdry tradition of the Empire, so long as they 
profess militarism, so long as they keep up their 
ridiculous belief in some strange racial superiority 
to the rest of mankind, it is absurd to expect any co- 
operative feeling between them and any other great 
people. The American tradition is based upon the 
casting off of a Germanic monarchy; it is its 
cardinal idea. These sturdy Republicans did not 
fling out the Hanoverians and their Hessian troops 
to prepare the path of glory for Potsdam. But ex- 
cept for the gash caused by the Teutonic monarchy, 
there runs round the whole world a north temperate 
and sub-arctic zone of peoples, generally similar in 
complexion, physical circumstances, and intellect- 
ual and moral quality, having enormous unde- 
veloped natural resources, and a common interest 
in keeping the peace while these natural resources 
are developed, having also a common interest in 
maintaining the integrity of China and preventing 
her development into a military power ; it is a zone 
with the clearest prospect of a vast increase in its 
already enormous population, and it speaks in the 



THE UNITED STATES 223 

main one or other of three languages, either French, 
Kussian, or English. I believe that natural sym- 
pathy will march with the obvious possibilities of 
the situation in bringing the American mind to the 
realisation of this band of common interests, and 
of its compatibility with the older idea of an Ameri- 
can continent protected by a Monroe doctrine from 
any possibility of aggression from the monarchies 
of the old world. As the old conception of isola- 
tion fades, and the American mind accustoms itself 
to the new conception of a need of alliances and un- 
derstandings to save mankind from the megalo- 
mania of races and dynasties, I believe it will turn 
first to the idea of keeping the seas with Britain 
and France, and then to this still wider idea of an 
understanding with the Pledged Allies that will 
keep the peace of the world. 

Now Germany has taught the world several 
things, and one of the most important of these les- 
sons is the fact that the destinies of States and 
peoples is no longer to be determined by the secret 
arrangements of diplomatists and the agreements 
or jealousies of kings. For fifty years Germany 
has been unifying the mind of her people against 
the world. She has obsessed them with an evil 
ideal, but the point we have to note is that she has 



224 WHAT IS COMING? 

succeeded in obsessing them with that ideal. No 
other modern country has even attempted such a 
moral and mental solidarity as Germany has 
achieved. And good ideals need, just as much as 
bad ones, systematic inculcation, continual open 
expression and restatement. Mute, mindless, or 
demented nations are dangerous and doomed na- 
tions. The great political conceptions that are 
needed to establish the peace of the world must be- 
come the common property of the mass of intelligent 
adults if they are to hold against the political 
scoundrel, the royal adventurer, the forensic ex- 
ploiter, the enemies and scatterers of mankind. 
The French, Americans, and English have to realise 
this necessity; they have to state a common will 
and they have to make their possession by that will 
understood by the Russian people, and they have 
to share that will with the Eussian people. Be- 
yond that there lies the still greater task of making 
some common system of understandings with the 
intellectual masses of China and India. At pres- 
ent, with three of these four great Powers enor- 
mously preoccupied with actual warfare, there is an 
opportunity for guiding expression on the part of 
America such as may never occur again. . . . 
So far I have been stating a situation and re- 



THE UNITED STATES 225 

viewing certain possibilities. In the past half cen- 
tury the United States has been developing a great 
system of universities and a continental production 
of literature and discussion to supplement the 
limited press and the New England literature of 
the earlier phase of the American process. It is 
one of the most interesting speculations in the 
world to every one how far this new organisation 
of the American mind is capable of grasping the 
stupendous opportunities and appeals of the pres- 
ent time. The war and the great occasions that 
must follow the war, will tax the mind and the in- 
tellectual and moral forces of the Pledged Allies 
enormously. How far is this new but very great 
and growing system of thought and learning in the 
United States capable of that propaganda of ideas 
and language, that progressive expression of a de- 
veloping ideal of community, that in countries so 
spontaneous, so chaotic or democratic as the United 
States and the Pledged Allies must necessarily take 
the place of the organised authoritative Kultur of 
the Teutonic type of State. As an undisguisedly 
patriotic Englishman I would like to see the lead 
in this intellectual synthesis of the nations, that 
must be achieved if wars are to cease, undertaken 
by Great Britain. But I am bound to confess that 



226 WHAT IS COMING? 

in Great Britain I see neither the imaginative 
courage of France nor the brisk enterprise of the 
Americans. I see this matter as a question of 
peace and civilisation, but there are other baser but 
quite as effective reasons why America, France and 
Great Britain should exert themselves to create 
confidences and understandings between their pop- 
ulations and the Russian population. There is 
the immediate business opportunity in Russia. 
There is the secondary business opportunity in 
China that can best be developed as the partners 
rather than as the rivals of the Russians. Since 
the Americans are nearest, by way of the Pacific, 
since they are likely to have more capital and more 
free energy to play with than the Pledged Allies, 
I do on the whole incline to the belief that it is they 
who will yet do the pioneer work and the leading 
work that this opportunity demands. 

§ 2 
If beneath the alliances of the present war there 
is to grow up a system of enduring understandings 
that will lead to the peace of the world, there is 
needed as a basis for such understandings much 
greater facility of intellectual intercourse than ex- 
ists at present. Firstly the world needs a lingua 



THE UNITED STATES 227 

franca, next the Western peoples need to know more 
of the Russian language and life than they do, and 
thirdly the English language needs to be made more 
easily accessible than it is at present. The chief 
obstacle to a Frenchman or Englishman learning 
Russian is the difficult and confusing alphabet ; the 
chief obstacle to any one learning English is the 
irrational spelling. Are people likely to overcome 
these very serious difficulties in the future, and if 
so how will they do it? And what prospects are 
there of a lingua franca? 

Wherever one looks closely into the causes and 
determining influences of the great convulsions of 
this time, one is more and more impressed by the 
apparent smallness of the ultimate directing in- 
fluence. It seems to me at least that it is a prac- 
tically proven thing that this vast aggression of 
Germany is to be traced back to a general tone of 
court thinking and discussion in the Prussia of the 
eighteenth century, to the theories of a few pro- 
fessors and the gathering trend of German educa- 
tion in a certain direction. It seems to me that 
similarly the language teachers of to-day and to- 
morrow may hold in their hands the seeds of gigan- 
tic international developments in the future. 

It is not a question of the skill or devotion of 



228 WHAT IS COMING? 

individual teachers so much as of the possibility 
of organising them upon a grand scale. An in- 
dividual teacher must necessarily use the ordinary 
books and ordinary spelling and type of the lan- 
guage in which he is giving instruction ; he may get 
a few elementary instruction books from a private 
publisher, specially printed for teaching purposes, 
but very speedily he finds himself obliged to go to 
the current printed matter. This, as I will immedi- 
ately show, bars the most rapid and fruitful method 
of teaching. And in this as in most affairs private 
enterprise, the individualistic system, shows itself 
a failure. In England, for example, the choice of 
Russian lesson books is poor and unsatisfactory, 
and there is either no serviceable Russian -English, 
English-Russian school dictionary in existence or it 
is published so badly as to be beyond the range of 
my enquiries. But a State, or a group of universi- 
ties, or even a rich private association such as far- 
seeing American, French, and British business men 
might be reasonably expected to form, could attack 
the problem of teaching a language in an altogether 
different fashion. 

The difficulty in teaching English lies in the in- 
consistency of the spelling, and the consequent diffi- 
culties of pronunciation. If there were available 



THE UNITED STATES 229 

an ample series of text-books, reading books, and 
books of general interest, done in a consistent 
phonetic type and spelling — in which the value 
of the letters of the phonetic system followed as 
far as possible the prevalent usage in Europe — the 
difficulty in teaching English not merely to for- 
eigners but, as the experiments in teaching reading 
of the Simplified Spelling Society have proved up 
to the hilt, to English children, can be very greatly 
reduced. At first the difficulty of the irrational 
spelling can be set on one side. The learner at- 
tacks and masters the essential language. Then 
afterwards he can if he likes go on to the orthodox 
spelling, which is then no harder for him to read 
and master than it is for an Englishman of ordinary 
education to read the facetious orthography of 
Artemus Ward or of the Westminster Gazette 
" orfis boy." The learner does one thing at a time 
instead of attempting, as he would otherwise have 
to do, two things — and they are both difficult and 
different and conflicting things — simultaneously. 
Learning a language is one thing and memorising 
an illogical system of visual images — for that is 
what reading ordinary English spelling comes to — 
is quite another. A man can learn to play first 
chess and then bridge in half the time that these 



230 WHAT IS COMING? 

two games would require if he began by attempting 
simultaneous play, and exactly the same principle 
applies to the language problem. 

These considerations lead on to the idea of a 
special development or sub-species of the English 
language for elementary teaching and foreign con- 
sumption. It would be English, very slightly sim- 
plified and regularised, and phonetically spelt. 
Let us call it Anglo-American. In it the pro- 
pagandist power, whatever that power might be, 
state, university, or association, would print not 
simply instruction books but a literature of cheap 
editions. Such a specialised simplified Anglo- 
American variety of English would enormously 
stimulate the already wide diffusion of the lan- 
guage, and go far to establish it as that lingua 
franca of which the world has need. 

And in the same way, the phonetic alphabet 
adopted as the English medium could be used as the 
medium for instruction in French, w T here, as in the 
British Isles, Canada, north and central Africa, 
and large regions of the East, it is desirable to 
make an English-speaking community bilingual. 
At present a book in French means nothing to an 
uninstructed Englishman, an English book con- 
veys no accurate sound images to an uninstructed 



THE UNITED STATES 231 

Frenchman. On the other hand, a French book 
printed on a proper phonetic system could be im- 
mediately read aloud — though of course it could 
not be understood — by an uninstructed English- 
man. From the first he would have no difficulties 
with the sounds. And vice versa. Such a system 
of books would mean the destruction of what are 
for great masses of French and English people in- 
surmountable difficulties on the way to bilingual- 
ism. Its production is a task all too colossal for 
any private publishers or teachers, but it is a task 
altogether trivial in comparison with the national 
value of its consequences. But whether it will ever 
be carried out, is just one of those riddles of the 
jumping cat in the human brain that are most per- 
plexing to the prophet. 

The problem becomes at once graver, less hopeful, 
and more urgent when we take up the case of 
Russia. I have looked closely into this business 
of Russian teaching, and I am convinced that only 
a very, very small number of French- and English- 
speaking people are going to master Russian under 
the existing conditions of instruction. If we West- 
erns want to get at Russia in good earnest we must 
take up this Russian language problem with an 
imaginative courage and upon a scale of which at 



232 WHAT IS COMING? 

present I see no signs. If we do not, then the Bel- 
gians, French, Americans, and English will be do- 
ing business in Russia after the war in the German 
language — or through a friendly German inter- 
preter. That, I am afraid, is the probability of the 
case. But it need not be the case. Will and in- 
telligence could alter all that. 

What has to be done is to have Russian taught at 
first in a western phonetic type. Then it becomes 
a language not very much more difficult to acquire 
than, say, German by a Frenchman. When the 
learner can talk with some freedom, has a fairly 
full vocabulary, a phraseology, knows his verb and 
so on, then and then only should he take up the 
unfamiliar and confusing set of visual images of 
Russian lettering — I speak from the point of view 
of those who read the Latin alphabet. How con- 
fusing it may be only those who have tried it can 
tell. Its familiarity to the eye increases the diffi- 
culty ; totally unfamiliar forms would be easier to 
learn. The Frenchman or Englishman is con- 
fronted with 



the sound of that is 



COP 



S A R ! 



THE UNITED STATES 233 

For those who learn languages, as so many peo- 
ple do nowadays, by visual images, there will al- 
ways be an undercurrent towards saying " COP." 
The mind plunges hopelessly through that tangle to 
the elements of a speech which is as yet unknown. 

Nevertheless almost all the instruction in Rus- 
sian of which I can get an account begins with the 
alphabet, and must, I suppose, begin with the al- 
phabet until teachers have a suitable printed set of 
instruction books to enable them to take the better 
line. One school teacher, I know, in a public 
school, devoted the entire first term, the third of a 
year, to the alphabet. At the end he was still dis- 
satisfied with the progress of his pupils. He gave 
them Russian words, of course, words of which they 
knew nothing — in Russian characters. It was 
too much for them to take hold of at one and the 
same time. He did not even think of teaching them 
to write French and English words in the strange 
lettering. He did not attempt to write his Russian 
in Latin letters. He was apparently ignorant of 
any system of transliteration, and he did nothing to 
mitigate the impossible task before him. At the 
end of the term most of his pupils gave up the hope- 
less effort. It is not too much to say that for a 
great number of " visualising " people, the double 



234 WHAT IS COMING? 

effort at the outset of Russian is entirely too much. 
It stops them altogether. But to almost any one 
it is possible to learn Russian if at first it is pre- 
sented in a lettering that gives no trouble. If I 
found myself obliged to learn Russian urgently, I 
would get some accepted system of transliteration, 
carefully transcribe every word of Russian in my 
textbook into the Latin characters, and learn the 
elements of the language from my manuscript. A 
year or so ago I made a brief visit to Russia with a 
" Russian Self-Taught " in my pocket. Nothing 
sticks, nothing ever did stick of that self-taught 
Russian except the words that I learnt in Latin 
type. Those I remember as I remember all words, 
as groups of Latin letters. I learnt to count, for 
example, up to a hundred. The other day I failed 
to recognise the Russian word for eleven in Russian 
characters, until I had spelt it out. Then I said 
" Oh ! of course ! n But I knew it when I heard it. 
I write of these things from the point of view of 
the keen learner. Some Russian teachers will be 
found to agree with me; others will not. It is a 
paradox in the psychology of the teacher, that few 
teachers are willing to adopt " slick " methods of 
teaching; they hate cutting corners far more than 
they hate obstacles, because their interest is in the 



THE UNITED STATES 235 

teaching and not in the " getting there." But what 
we learners want is not an exquisite, rare knowl- 
edge of particulars, we do not want to spend an 
hour upon Russian needlessly ; we want to get there 
as quickly and effectively as possible. And for 
that, transliterated books are essential. 

Now these may seem small details in the learn- 
ing of languages, mere schoolmasters' gossip, but 
the consequences are on the continental scale. 
The want of these national textbooks and readers is 
a great gulf between Russia and her Allies ; it is a 
greater gulf than the profoundest political misun- 
derstanding could be. We cannot get at them to 
talk plainly to them, and they cannot get at us to 
talk plainly to us. A narrow bridge of interpre- 
ters is our only link with the Russian mind. And 
many of those interpreters are of a race which is 
for very good reasons hostile to Russia. An abund- 
ant, cheap supply, firstly of English and French 
books, in English and French but in the Russian 
character, by means of which Russians may rap- 
idly learn French and English — for it is quite a 
fable that these languages are known and used in 
Russia below the level of the court and aristoc- 
racy — and secondly of Russian books in the Latin 
(or some easy phonetic development of the Latin) 



236 WHAT IS COMING? 

type, will do more to facilitate interchange and in- 
tercourse between Russia and France, America, and 
Britain, and so consolidate the present alliance 
than almost any other single thing. But that sup- 
ply will not be a paying thing to provide; if it is 
left to publishers or private language teachers or 
any form of private enterprise it will never be pro- 
vided. It is a necessary public undertaking. 

But because a thing is necessary it does not fol- 
low that it will be achieved. Bread may be neces- 
sary to a starving man, but there is always the 
alternative that he will starve. France, which is 
most accessible to creative ideas, is least interested 
in this particular matter. Great Britain is still 
heavily conservative. It is idle to ignore the forces 
still entrenched in the established church, in the 
universities and the great schools, that stand for 
an irrational resistance to all new things. Ameri- 
can universities are comparatively youthful, and 
sometimes quite surprisingly innovating, and 
America is the country of the adventurous million- 
aire. There has been evidence in several American 
papers that have reached me recently of a disposi- 
tion to get ahead with Russia and cut out the Ger- 
mans (and incidentally the British). Amidst the 
cross-currents and overlappings of this extraordi- 



THE UNITED STATES 237 

nary time, it seems to me highly probable that 
America may lead in this vitally important effort 
to promote international understanding. 



XI 

" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 

One of the most curious aspects of the British 
" Pacifist " is his willingness to give over great 
blocks of the black and coloured races to the Hohen- 
zollerns to exploit and experiment upon. I myself 
being something of a pacifist, and doing what I can, 
in my corner, to bring about the Peace of the World, 
the Peace of the World triumphant and armed 
against every disturber, could the more readily 
sympathise with the passive school of Pacifists if 
its proposals involved the idea that England should 
keep to England and Germany to Germany. My 
political ideal is the United States of the World, a 
union of States whose state boundaries are deter- 
mined by what I have defined as the natural map of 
mankind. I cannot understand those Pacifists who 
talk about the German right to " expansion/' and 
babble about a return of her justly lost colonies. 
That seems to me not pacificism but patriotic 
inversion. This large disposition to hand over 
our fellow-creatures to a Teutonic educational sys- 

238 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 239 

tern with " frightfulness " in reserve, to " effi- 
ciency " on Wittenburg lines, leaves me — hot. The 
ghosts of the thirst-tormented Hereros rise up 
in their thousands from the African dust, protest- 
ing. 

This talk of " legitimate expansion " is indeed 
now only an exploiter's cant. The age of " expan- 
sion," the age of European " empires " is near its 
end. No one who can read the signs of the times in 
Japan, in India, in China, can doubt it. It ended 
in America a hundred years ago ; it is ending now 
in Asia; it will end last in Africa, and even in 
Africa the end draws near. Spain has but led the 
way which other " empires " must follow. Look at 
her empire in the atlases of 1800. She fell down 
the steps, it is true — but they are difficult to 
descend. No sane man, German or anti-German, 
who has weighed the prospects of the new age, will 
be desirous of a restoration of the now vanished 
German colonial empire, vindictive, intriguing, and 
unscrupulous, a mere series of centres of attack 
upon adjacent territory, to complicate the immense 
disentanglements and readjustments that lie al- 
ready before the French and British and Ital- 
ians. 

Directly we discuss the problem of the absolutely 



240 WHAT IS COMING? 

necessary permanent alliance that this war has 
forced upon at least France, Belgium, Britain and 
Russia, this problem of the " empires " faces us. 
What are these Allies going to do about their " sub- 
ject races "? What is the world going to do about 
the " subject races "? It is a matter in which the 
" subject races " are likely to have an increasingly 
important voice of their own. We Europeans may 
discuss their fate to-day among ourselves ; we shall 
be discussing it with them to-morrow. If we do 
not agree with them then, they will take their fates 
in their own hands in spite of us. Long before a.d. 
2100, there will be no such thing as a " subject 
race " in all the world. 

Here again we find ourselves asking just that 
same difficult question of more or less, that arises 
at every cardinal point of our review of the prob- 
able future. How far is this thing going to be done 
finely ; how far is it going to be done cunningly and 
basely? How far will greatness of mind, how far 
will imaginative generosity, prevail over the jeal- 
ous and pettifogging spirit that lurks in every 
human being? Are French and British and Bel- 
gians and Italians, for example, going to help each 
other in Africa, or are they going to work against 
and cheat each other? Is the Russian seeking only 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 241 

a necessary outlet to the seas of the world, or has he 
dreams of Delhi? Here again, as in all these ques- 
tions, personal idiosyncrasy comes in ; I am strongly 
disposed to trust the good in the Russian. But 
apart from this uncertain question of generosity, 
there are in this present case two powerful forces 
that make against disputes, secret disloyalties, and 
meanness. One is that Germany will certainly be 
still dangerous at the end of the war, and the sec- 
ond is that the gap in education, in efficiency, in 
national feeling and courage of outlook, between 
the European and the great Asiatic and African 
communities, is rapidly diminishing. If the Eu- 
ropeans squabble much more for world ascendency, 
there will be no world ascendency for them to 
squabble for. We have still no means of measur- 
ing the relative enfeeblement of Europe in compari- 
son with Asia already produced by this war. As it 
is, certain things are so inevitable — the integra- 
tion of a modernised Bengal, of China, and of Egypt 
for example — that the question before us is prac- 
tically reduced to whether this restoration of the 
subject peoples will be done with the European's 
aid and goodwill, or whether it will be done against 
him. That it will be done in some manner or other, 
is certain. 



242 WHAT IS COMING? 

The days of suppression are over. They know it 
in every country where white and brown and yel- 
low mingle. If the Pledged Allies are not disposed 
to let in light to their subject peoples and prepare 
for the days of world equality that are coming, the 
Germans will. If the Germans fail to be the most 
enslaving of people, they may become the most 
liberating. They will set themselves, with their 
characteristic thoroughness, to destroy that magic 
" prestige " which in Asia particularly is the clue to 
the miracle of European ascendency. In the long 
run that may prove no ill service to mankind. The 
European must prepare to make himself acceptable 
in Asia, to state his case to Asia and be understood 
by Asia, or to leave Asia. That is the blunt reality 
of the Asiatic situation. 

It has already been pointed out in these chapters 
that if the alliance of the Pledged Allies is indeed 
to be permanent, it implies something in the nature 
of a Zollverein, a common policy towards the rest 
of the world and an arrangement involving a com- 
mon control over the dependencies of all the Allies. 
It will be interesting now that we have sketched a 
possible map of Europe after the war, to look a 
little more closely into the nature of the " empires " 
concerned, and to attempt a few broad details of 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 243 

the probable map of the eastern hemisphere outside 
Europe in the years immediately to come. 

Now there are, roughly speaking, three types of 
overseas "possessions." They may be either (1) 
territory that was originally practically unoccupied 
and that was settled by the imperial people, or (2) 
territory with a barbaric population having no 
national idea, or (3) conquered States. In the 
case of the British Empire all three are present ; in 
the case of the French only the second and third; 
in the case of the Russian only the first and third. 
Each of these types must necessarily follow its own 
system of developments. Take first those terri- 
tories originally but thinly occupied, or not occu- 
pied at all, of which all or at least the dominant 
element of the population is akin to that of the 
" home country." These used to be called by the 
British " colonies " — though the " colonies " of 
Greece and Rome were really only garrison cities 
settled in foreign lands — and they are now being 
rechristened " Dominions." Australia for instance 
is a British Dominion, and Siberia and most of 
Russia in Asia, a Russian Dominion. Their mani- 
fest destiny is for their children to become equal 
citizens with the cousins and brothers they have 
left at home. 



244 WHAT IS COMING? 

There has been much discussion in England dur- 
ing the last decade upon some modification of the 
British legislature that would admit representa- 
tives from the Dominions to a proportional share 
in the government of the empire. The problem has 
been complicated by the unsettled status of Ireland 
and the mischief-making Tories there, and by the 
perplexities arising out of those British depend- 
encies of non-British race, the Indian States for 
example, whose interests are sometimes in conflict 
with those of the Dominions. The attractiveness 
of the idea of an Imperial legislature is chiefly on 
the surface, and I have very strong doubts of its 
realisability. These Dominions seem rather to 
tend to become independent and distinct sovereign 
States in close and affectionate alliance with Great 
Britain, and having a common interest in the Brit- 
ish navy. In many ways the interests of the Domin- 
ions are more divergent from those of Great Britain 
than are Great Britain and Russia, or Great Britain 
and France. Many of the interests of Canada are 
more closely bound to those of the United States 
than they are to those of Australasia, in such a 
matter as the maintenance of the Monroe Principle 
for example. South Africa again takes a line with 
regard to British Indian subjects which is highly 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 245 

embarrassing to Great Britain. There is a tend- 
ency in all the British colonies to read American 
books and periodicals rather than British, if for 
no other reason than because their common life, 
life in a newish and very democratic land, is much 
more American than British in character. On the 
other hand Great Britain has European interests — 
the integrity of Holland and Belgium is a case in 
point — which are much closer to the interests of 
France than they are to those of the younger 
Britains beyond the seas. A voice in an alliance 
that included France and the United States and 
had its chief common interest in the control of the 
seas, may in the future seem far more desirable 
to these great and growing English-speaking 
Dominions than the sending of representatives to 
an imperial House of Lords at Westminster, and 
the adornment of elderly colonial politicians with 
titles and decorations at Buckingham Palace. 

I think Great Britain and her Allies have all of 
them to prepare their minds for a certain release of 
their grip upon their " possessions," if they wish to 
build up a larger unity ; I do not see that any secure 
unanimity of purpose is possible without such re- 
leases and readjustments. 

Now the next class of foreign " possession " is 



246 WHAT IS COMING? 

that in which the French and Belgians and Italians 
are most interested. Britain also has possessions 
of this type in Central Africa and the less civilised 
districts of India, but Russia has scarcely anything 
of the sort. In this second class of possession, the 
population is numerous, barbaric, and incapable of 
any large or enduring political structure, and over 
it rules a small minority of European adminis- 
trators. The greatest of this series of possessions 
are those in black Africa. The French imagina- 
tion has taken a very strong hold of the idea of a 
great French-speaking West and Central Africa, 
with which the ordinary British citizen will only 
too gladly see the conquered German colonies in- 
corporated. The Italians have a parallel field of 
development in the hinterland of Tripoli. Side by 
side, France, Belgium and Italy, no longer troubled 
by hostile intrigues, may very well set themselves 
in the future to the task of building up a congenial 
Latin civilisation out of the tribal confusions of 
these vast regions. They will, I am convinced, do 
far better than the English in this domain. The 
English-speaking peoples have been perhaps the 
most successful settlers in the world; the United 
States and the Dominions are there to prove it; 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 247 

only the Russians in Siberia can compare with 
them ; but as administrators the British are a race 
coldly aloof. They have nothing to give a black 
people, and no disposition to give. The Latin- 
speaking peoples, the Mediterranean nations, on the 
other hand, have proved the most successful assimi- 
lators of other races that mankind has ever known. 
Alexandre Dumas is not the least of the glories of 
France. In a hundred years' time black Africa, 
west of Tripoli, from Oran to Rhodesia, will, I be- 
lieve, talk French. And what does not speak 
French will speak the closely related Italian. I do 
not see why this Latin black culture should not ex- 
tend across equatorial Africa to meet the Indian 
influence at the coast, and reach out to join hands 
with Madagascar. I do not see why the British 
flag should be any impediment to the Latinisation 
of tropical Africa, or to the natural extension of 
the French and Italian languages through Egypt. 
I guess, however, that it will be an Islamic and not 
a Christian cult that will be talking Italian and 
French. For the French-speaking civilisation will 
make roads not only for French, Belgians, and 
Italians, but for the Arabs whose religion and cul- 
ture already lie like a net over black Africa. No 



248 WHAT IS COMING? 

other peoples and 110 other religion can so conveni- 
ently give the negro what is needed to bring him 
into the comity of civilised peoples. . . . 

A few words of digression upon the future of 
Islam may not be out of place here. The idea of a 
militant Christendom has vanished from the world. 
The last pretensions of Christian propaganda have 
been buried in the Balkan trenches. A unification 
of Africa under Latin auspices carries with it now 
no threat of missionary invasion. Africa will be 
a fair field for all religions, and the religion to 
which the negro will take will be the religion that 
best suits his needs. That religion, we are told by 
nearly every one who has a right to speak upon such 
questions, is Islam, and its natural propagandist is 
the Arab. There is no reason why he should not be 
a Frenchified Arab. 

Both the French and the British have the strong- 
est interest in the revival of Arabic culture. Let 
the German learn Turkish if it pleases him. 
Through all Africa and Western Asia there is a 
great to-morrow for a renascent Islam under Arab 
auspices. Constantinople, that venal city of the 
waterways, sitting like Asenath at the ford, has cor- 
rupted all who came to her ; she has been the paraly- 
sis of Islam. But the Islam of the Turk is a differ- 



"THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN" 249 

ent thing from the Islam of the Arab. That was 
one of the great progressive impulses in the world 
of men. It is our custom to underrate the Arab's 
contribution to civilisation quite absurdly in com- 
parison with our debt to the Hebrew and Greek. 
It is to the initiatives of Islamic culture, for ex- 
ample, that we owe our numerals, the bulk of mod- 
ern mathematics, and the science of chemistry. 
The British have already set themselves to the 
establishment of Islamic university teaching in 
Egypt, but that is the mere first stroke of the pick 
at the opening of the mine. English, French, Rus- 
sian, Arabic, Hindustani, Spanish, Italian : these 
are the great world languages that most concern 
the future of civilisation from the point of view of 
the Peace Alliance that impends. No country can 
afford to neglect any of those languages, but as a 
matter of primary importance I would say, for the 
British, Hindustani, for the Americans, Russian or 
Spanish, for the French and Belgians and Italians, 
Arabic. These are the directions in which the duty 
of understanding is most urgent for each of these 
peoples, and the path of opportunity plainest. 

The disposition to underrate temporarily de- 
pressed nations, races, and cultures is a most irra- 
tional, prevalent, and mischievous form of stu- 



250 WHAT IS COMING? 

pidity. It distorts our entire outlook towards the 
future. The British reader can see its absurdity 
most easily when he reads the ravings of some patri- 
otic German upon the superiority of the " Teuton " 
over the Italians and Greeks — to whom we owe 
most things of importance in European civilisation. 
Equally silly stuff is still to be read in British and 
American books about " Asiatics." And was there 
not some fearful rubbish, not only in German but 
in English and French, about the " decadence " of 
France? But we are learning — rapidly. When 
I was a student in London, thirty years ago, we re- 
garded Japan as a fantastic joke ; the comic opera, 
The Mikado, still preserves that foolish phase for 
the admiration of posterity. And to-day there is 
a quite unjustifiable tendency to ignore the qualit} 7 
of the Arab and of his religion. Islam is an open- 
air religion, noble and simple in its broad concep- 
tions ; it is none the less vital from Nigeria to China 
because it has sickened in the closeness of Con- 
stantinople. The French, the Italians, the British 
have to reckon with Islam and the Arab ; where the 
continental deserts are there the Arabs are and 
there is Islam ; their culture will never be destroyed 
and replaced over these regions by Europeanism. 
The Allies who prepare the Peace of the World 



"THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 251 

have to make their peace with that. And when I 
foreshadow this necessary liaison of the French and 
Arabic cultures, I am thinking not only of the Arab 
that is, but of the Arab that is to come. The whole 
trend of events in Asia Minor, the breaking up and 
decapitation of the Ottoman Empire and the Eu- 
phrates invasion, points to a great revival of Meso- 
potamia — at first under European direction. The 
vast system of irrigation that was destroyed by the 
Mongol armies of Hulugu in the thirteenth century, 
will be restored ; the desert will again become popu- 
lous. But the local type will prevail. The new 
population of Mesopotamia will be neither Euro- 
pean nor Indian; it will be Arabic; and with its 
concentration Arabic will lay hold of the printing 
press. A new intellectual movement in Islam, a 
renascent Bagdad, is as inevitable as the year 1950. 
I have, however, gone a little beyond the discus- 
sion of the future of the barbaric possessions in 
these anticipations of an Arabic co-operation with 
the Latin peoples in the reconstruction of Western 
Asia and the barbaric regions of North and Central 
Africa. But regions of administered barbarism 
occur not only in Africa. The point is that they 
are administered, and that their economic develop- 
ment is very largely in the hands, and will for many 



252 WHAT IS COMING? 

generations remain in the hands, of the possessing 
country. Hitherto their administration has been 
in the interests of the possessing nation alone. 
Their acquisition has been a matter of bitter rival- 
ries, their continued administration upon exclusive 
lines is bound to lead to dangerous clashings. The 
commonsense of the situation points to a policy of 
give and take, in which throughout the possessions 
of all the Pledged Allies, the citizens of all will 
have more or less equal civil advantages. And this 
means some consolidation of the general control of 
those Administered Territories. I have already 
hinted at the possibility that the now exclusively 
British navy may some day be a world navy con- 
trolled by an Admiralty representing a group of 
allies, Australasia, Canada, Britain and, it may be, 
France and Russia and the United States. To those 
who know how detached the British Admiralty is at 
the present time from the general methods of Brit- 
ish political life, there will be nothing strange in 
this idea of its completer detachment. Its person- 
nel does to a large extent constitute a class apart. 
It takes its boys out of the general life very often be- 
fore they have got to their fourteenth birthday. It 
is not so closely linked up with specific British so- 
cial elements, with political parties and the general 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 253 

educational system, as are the rest of the national 
services. There is nothing so very fantastic in this 
idea of a sort of World-Admiralty; it is not even 
completely novel. Such bodies as the Knights 
Templar transcended nationality in the Middle 
Ages. I do not see how some such synthetic control 
of the seas is to be avoided in the future. And now 
coming back to the " White Man's Burthen/' is 
there not a possibility that such a board of marine 
and international control as the naval and interna- 
tional problems of the future may produce ( or some 
closely parallel body with a stronger Latin ele- 
ment) would also be capable of dealing with these 
barbaric " Administered Territories " ? A day may 
come when Tripoli, Nigeria, the French and the 
Belgian Congo will be all under one supreme con- 
trol. We may be laying the foundations of such a 
system to-day unawares. The unstable and fluctu- 
ating conferences of the Allies to-day, their re- 
peated experiences of the disadvantages of evan- 
escent and discontinuous co-ordinations, may press 
them almost unconsciously towards this building 
up of things greater than they know. 

We come now to the third and most difficult type 
of overseas " possessions." These are the annexed 
or conquered regions with settled populations al- 



254 WHAT IS COMING? 

ready having a national tradition and culture of 
their own. They are, to put it bluntly, the sup- 
pressed, the overlaid, nations. Now I am a writer 
rather prejudiced against the idea of nationality; 
my habit of thought is cosmopolitan; I hate and 
despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and for- 
eign ways; a man who can look me in the face, 
laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my 
brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as 
yellow as an evening primrose. But I have to 
recognise the facts of the case. In spite of all my 
large liberality, I find it less irritating to be ruled 
by people of my own language and race and tradi- 
tion, and I perceive that for the mass of people 
alien rule is intolerable. Local difference, nation- 
ality, is a very obstinate thing. Every country 
tends to revert to its natural type. Nationality 
will out. Once a people has emerged above the 
barbaric stage to a national consciousness, that con- 
sciousness will endure. There is practically al- 
ways going to be an Egypt, a Poland, an Armenia. 
There is no Indian nation, there never has been, 
but there are manifestly a Bengal and a Rajapu- 
tana, there is manifestly a constellation of civilised 
nations in India. Several of these have literatures 
and traditions that extend back before the days 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 255 

when the Britains painted themselves with woad. 
Let ns deal with this question 1 ainly with refer- 
ence to India. What is said will apply equally to 
Burmah or Egypt or Armenia or — to come back 
into Europe — Poland. 

Now I have talked, I suppose, with many scores 
of people about the future of India, and I have never 
yet met any one, Indian or British, who thought it 
desirable that the British should evacuate India at 
once. And I have never yet met any one who did 
not think that ultimately the British must let the 
Indian nations control their own destinies. There 
are really not two opposite opinions about the des- 
tiny of India, but only differences of opinion as to 
the length of time in which that destiny is to be 
achieved. Many Indians- think ( and I agree with 
them ) that India might be a confederation of sover- 
eign States in close alliance with the British Em- 
pire and its Allies within the space of fifty years or 
so. The opposite extreme was expressed by an old 
weary Indian administrator who told me, " Per- 
haps they may begin to be capable of self-govern- 
ment in four or five hundred years." These are 
the extreme Liberal and the extreme Tory positions 
in this question. It is a choice between decades 
and centuries. There is no denial of the inevita- 



256 WHAT IS COMING? 

Lility of ultimate restoration. No one of any ex- 
perience believes the British administration in 
India is an eternal institution. 

There is a great deal of cant in this matter in 
Great Britain. Genteel English people with rela- 
tions in the Indian Civil Service and habits of self- 
delusion, believe that Indians are " grateful n for 
British rule. The sort of " patriotic " self-flattery 
that prevailed in the Victorian age, and which is 
so closely akin to contemporary German follies, 
fostered and cultivated this sweet delusion. There 
are no doubt old ladies in Germany to-day who be- 
lieve that Belgium will presently be " grateful " 
for the present German administration. Let us 
clear our minds of such cant. As a matter of fact 
no Indians really like British rule or think of it as 
anything better than a necessary, temporary evil. 
Let me put the parallel case to an Englishman or 
a Frenchman. Through various political inepti- 
tudes our country has, we will suppose, fallen under 
the rule of the Chinese. They administer it, we 
will further assume, with an efficiency and honesty 
unparalleled in the bad old times of our lawyer- 
politicians. They do not admit us to the higher 
branches of the administration; they go about our 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 257 

country wearing a strange costume, professing a 
strange religion — which implies that ours is 
wrong — speaking an unfamiliar tongue. They 
control our financial system and our economic de- 
velopment — on Chinese lines of the highest merit. 
They take the utmost care of our Gothic cathedrals 
for us. They put our dearest racial possessions 
into museums and admire them very much indeed. 
They teach our young men to fly kites and eat bird's 
nest soup. They do all that a well-bred people can 
do, to conceal their habit and persuasion of a racial 
superiority. But they keep up their " prestige." 
. . . You know, we shouldn't love them. It really 
isn't a question of whether they rule well or ill, 
but that the position is against certain funda- 
mentals of human nature. The only possible foot- 
ing upon which we could meet them with comfort- 
able minds, would be the footing that we and they 
were discussing the terms of the restoration of our 
country. Then indeed we might almost feel 
friendly with them. That is the case with all civil- 
ised "possessions." The only terms upon which 
educated British and Indians can meet to-day with 
any comfort is precisely that. The living inter- 
course of the British and Indian mind to-day is the 



258 WHAT IS COMING? 

discussion of the restoration. Everything else is 
humbug on the one side and self-deception on the 
other. 

It is idle to speak of the British occupation of 
India as a conquest or a robbery. It is a fashion 
of much " advanced " literature in Europe to as- 
sume that the European rule of various Asiatic 
countries is the result of deliberate conquest with 
a view to spoliation. But that is only the ugly side 
of the facts. Cases of the deliberate invasion and 
spoliation of one country by another have been very 
rare in the history of the last three centuries. 
There has always been an excuse, and there has al- 
ways been a percentage of truth in the excuse. The 
history of every country contains phases of politi- 
cal ineptitude in which that country becomes so 
misgoverned as to be not only a nuisance to the for- 
eigner within its borders but a danger to its neigh- 
bours. Mexico is in such a phase to-day. And 
most of the aggressions and annexations of the mod- 
ern period have arisen out of the inconveniences 
and reasonable fears caused by such an inept phase. 
I am a persistent advocate for the restoration of 
Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me 
that it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that 
Poland was a white lamb of a countrv torn to 



" THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN " 259 

pieces by three wicked neighbours. Poland in the 
eighteenth century was a dangerous political mud- 
dle, uncertain of her monarchy, her policy, her af- 
finities. She tempted her neighbours, but also she 
threatened them because there was no guarantee 
that she might not fall under the tutelage of one of 
them and become a weapon against the others. 
The division of Poland was an outrage upon the 
Polish people, but it was largely dictated by an hon- 
est desire to settle a dangerous possibility. It 
seemed less injurious than the possibility of a vacil- 
lating, independent Poland playing off one neigh- 
bour against another. That possibility will still be 
present in the minds of the diplomatists who will 
determine the settlement after the war. Until the 
Poles make up their minds, and either convince the 
Russians that they are on the side of Russia and 
Bohemia against Germany for ever more, or the 
Germans that they are willing to be Posenised, they 
will live between two distrustful enemies. The 
Poles need to think of the future more and the 
wrongs of Poland less. They want less patriotic 
intrigue and more racial self-respect. They are 
not only Poles but members of a greater brother- 
hood. My impression is that Poland will " go 
Slav " — in spite of Cracow. But I am not sure. 



260 WHAT IS COMING? 

I am haunted by the fear that Poland may still find 
her future hampered by Poles who are, as people 
say, " too clever by half." An incalculable Poland 
cannot be and will not be tolerated by the rest of 
Europe. 

And the overspreading of India by the British 
was in the same way very clearly done under com- 
pulsion, first lest the Dutch or French should ex- 
ploit the vast resources of the peninsula against 
Britain, and then for fear of a Russian exploita- 
tion. I am no apologist for British rule in India; 
I think we have neglected vast opportunities there ; 
it was our business from the outset to build up a 
free and friendly Indian confederation, and we 
have done not a tithe of what we might have done 
to that end. But then we have not done a little of 
what we might have done for our own country. 
Nevertheless we have our case to plead, not only 
for going to India but — with the Berlin papers 
still babbling of Bagdad and beyond * — of sticking 
there very grimly. And so too the British have a 
fairly sound excuse for grabbing Egypt in their 
fear lest in its phase of political ineptitude it 
should be the means of strangling the British Em- 
pire as the Turk in Constantinople has been used 

* This was written late in February, 1916. 



"THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN" 261 

to strangle the Russian. None of these justifica- 
tions, I admit, are complete, but all deserve consid- 
eration. It is no good arguing about the finer 
ethics of the things that are; the business of sane 
men is to get things better. The business of all 
sane men in all the countries of the Pledged Allies 
and in America is manifestly to sink petty jealous- 
ies and a suicidal competitiveness, and to organise 
co-operation with all the intellectual forces they 
can find or develop in the subject countries, to con- 
vert these inept national systems into politically ef- 
ficient independent organisations in a world peace 
alliance. If we fail to do that, then all the inept 
States and all the subject States about the world 
will become one great field for the sowing of tares 
by the enemy. 

So that with regard to the civilised just as with 
regard to the barbaric regions of the " possessions " 
of the European-centred empires, we come to the 
same conclusion. That on the whole the path of 
safety lies in the direction of pooling them and of 
declaring a common policy of progressive develop- 
ment leading to equality. The pattern of the 
United States, in which the procedure is first the 
annexation of " territories " and then their eleva- 
tion to the rank of " States," must, with of course 



262 WHAT IS COMIXG? 

far more difficulty and complication, be the pattern 
for the " empires " of to-day — so far as they are 
regions of alien population. The path of the Do- 
minions, settled by emigrants akin to the home pop- 
ulation, Siberia, Canada, and so forth, to equal 
citizenship with the people of the mother country, 
is by comparison simple and plain. 

And so the discussion of the future of the over- 
seas " empires " brings us again to the same realisa- 
tion to which the discussion of nearly every great 
issue arising out of this war has pointed, the real- 
isation of the imperative necessity of some great 
council or conference, some permanent overriding 
body, call it what you will, that will deal with 
things more broadly than any " nationalism " or 
" patriotic imperialism " can possibly do. That 
body must come into human affairs. Upon the 
courage and imagination of living statesmen it de- 
pends whether it will come simply and directly into 
concrete reality or whether it will materialise 
slowly through, it may be, centuries of blood and 
blundering from such phantom anticipations as 
this, anticipations that now haunt the thoughts of 
all politically-minded men. 



XII 
THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 

§ 1 
Whatever some of us among the Allies may say, 
the future of Germany lies with Germany. The ut- 
most ambition of the Allies falls far short of de- 
stroying or obliterating Germany ; it is to give the 
Germans so thorough and memorable an experience 
of war that they will want no more of it for a few 
generations, and, failing the learning of that les- 
son, to make sure that they will not be in a position 
to resume their military aggressions upon man- 
kind, with any hope of success. After all it is not 
the will of the Allies that has determined even this 
resolve. It is the declared and manifest will of 
Germany to become predominant in the world, that 
has created the Alliance against Germany, and 
forged and tempered our implacable resolution to 
bring militarist Germany down. And the na- 
ture of the coming peace and the politics that 
will follow the peace are much more dependent 

263 



264 WHAT IS COMING? 

upon German affairs than upon anything else 
whatever. 

This is so clearly understood in Great Britain 
that there is scarcely a newspaper that does not 
devote two or three columns daily to extracts from 
the German newspapers, and from letters found 
upon German killed, wounded, or prisoners, and to 
letters and descriptive articles from neutrals upon 
the state of the German mind. There can be no 
doubt that the British intelligence has grasped and 
kept its hold upon the real issue of this war with 
an unprecedented clarity. At the outset there 
came declarations from nearly every type of British 
opinion that this war was a war against the Hohen- 
zollern militarist idea, against Prussianism and 
not against Germany. In that respect Britain has 
documented herself up to the hilt. There have 
been, of course, a number of passionate outcries and 
wild accusations against Germans, as a race, during 
the course of the struggle ; but to this day opinion 
is steadfast not only in Britain, but if I may judge 
from the papers I read and the talk I hear, through- 
out the whole English-speaking community, that 
this is a war not of races but ideas. I am so cer- 
tain of this that I would say if Germany by some 
swift convulsion expelled her dynasty and turned 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 265 

herself into a republic, it would be impossible for 
the British Government to continue the war for 
long, whether it wanted to do so or not. The forces 
in favour of reconciliation would be too strong. 
There would be a complete revulsion from the pres- 
ent determination to continue the war to its bitter 
but conclusive end. 

It is fairly evident that the present German Gov- 
ernment understands this frame of mind quite 
clearly, and is extremely anxious to keep it from 
the knowledge of the German peoples. Every act 
or word from a British source that suggests an im- 
placable enmity against the Germans as a people, 
every war-time caricature and insult, is brought to 
their knowledge. It is the manifest interest of the 
Hohenzollerns and Prussianism to make this strug- 
gle a race struggle and not merely a political strug- 
gle, and to keep a wider breach between the peoples 
than between the governments. The " made in 
Germany " grievance has been used to the utmost 
against Great Britain, as an indication of race hos- 
tility. The everyday young German believes firmly 
that it was a blow aimed specially at Germany; 
that no such regulation affected any goods but Ger- 
man goods. And the English, with their charac- 
teristic heedlessness, have never troubled to disil- 



266 WHAT IS COMING? 

lusion him. But even the British caricaturist and 
the British soldier betray their fundamental opin- 
ion of the matter in their very insults. They will 
not use a word of abuse for the Germans as Ger- 
mans ; they call them " Huns," because they are 
thinking of Attila, because they are thinking of 
them as invaders under a monarch of peaceful 
France and Belgium and not as a people living in 
a land of their own. 

In Great Britain there is to this day so little hos- 
tility for Germans as such, that recently a nephew 
of Lord Haldane's, Sir George Makgill, has consid- 
ered it advisable to manufacture race hostility and 
provide the Hohenzollerns with instances and quo- 
tations through the exertions of a preposterous 
Anti-German League. Disregarding the essential 
evils of the Prussian idea this mischievous organ- 
isation has set itself to persuade the British people 
that the Germans are diabolical as a race. It has 
displayed great energy and ingenuity in pestering 
and insulting naturalised Germans and people of 
German origin in Britain — below the rank of the 
royal family that is — and in making enduring bad 
blood between them and the authentic British. It 
busies itself in breaking up meetings at which sen- 
timents friendly to Germany might be expressed, 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 267 

sentiments which, if they could be conveyed to Ger- 
man hearers, would certainly go far to weaken the 
determination of the German social democracy to 
fight to the end. There can, of course, be no doubt 
of the good faith of Sir George Makgill, but he 
could do the Kaiser no better service than to help 
in consolidating every rank and class of German, 
by this organisation of foolish violence of speech 
and act, by this profession of an irrational and im- 
placable hostility. His practical influence over 
here is trivial, thanks to the general good sense and 
the love of fair play in our people, but there can be 
little doubt that his intentions are about as injuri- 
ous to the future peace of the world as any inten- 
tions could be, and there can be no doubt that in- 
telligent use is made in Germany of the frothings 
and ravings of his followers. " Here you see is the 
disposition of the English," the imperialists will 
say to German pacificists. " They are dangerous 
lunatics. Clearly we must stick together to the 
end." . . . 

The stuff of Sir George MakgilPs league must not 
be taken as representative of any considerable sec- 
tion of British opinion, which is as a whole nearly 
as free from any sustained hatred of the Germans 
as it was at the beginning of the war. There are, 



268 WHAT IS COMING? 

of course, waves of indignation at such deliberate 
atrocities as the Lusitania outrage or the Zeppelin 
raids. Wittenburg will not early be forgotten, but 
it would take many Sir George Makgills to divert 
British anger from the responsible German Govern- 
ment to the German masses. 

That lack of any essential hatred does not mean 
that British opinion is not solidly for the continu- 
ation of this war against militarist imperialism to 
its complete and final defeat. But if that can be 
defeated to any extent in Germany by the Germans, 
if the way opens to a Germany as unmilitary and 
pacific as was Great Britain before this war, there 
remains from the British point of view nothing else 
to fight about. With the Germany of Vorwaerts 
which, I understand, would evacuate and compen- 
sate Belgium and Serbia, set up a buffer State in 
Alsace-Lorraine and another in a restored Poland 
(including Posen) the spirit of the Allies has no 
profound quarrel at all, has never had any quarrel. 
We would only too gladly meet that Germany at a 
green table to-morrow, and set to work arranging 
the compensation of Belgium and Serbia, and trac- 
ing over the outlines of the natural map of man- 
kind, the new political map of Europe. 

Still it must be admitted that not only in Great 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 269 

Britain but in all the allied countries one finds a 
certain active minority corresponding to Sir George 
Makgill's noisy following, who profess to believe 
that all Germans to the third and fourth generation 
(save and except the Hanoverian royal family dom- 
iciled in Great Britain ) are a vile, treacherous, and 
impossible race, a race animated by an incredible 
racial vanity, a race which is indeed scarcely any- 
thing but a conspiracy against the rest of mankind. 
The ravings of many of these people can only be 
paralleled by the stuff about the cunning of the 
Jesuits that once circulated in ultra-Protestant cir- 
cles in England. Elderly Protestant ladies used 
to look under the bed and in the cupboard every 
night for a Jesuit, just as nowadays they look for a 
German spy, and as no doubt old German ladies 
now look for Sir Edward Grey. It may be useful 
therefore, at the present time, to point out that not 
only is the aggressive German idea not peculiar to 
Germany, not only are there endless utterances of 
French Chauvinists and British imperialists to be 
found entirely as vain, unreasonable and aggres- 
sive, but that German militarist imperialism is so 
little representative of the German quality, that 
scarcely one of its leading exponents is a genuine 
German. 



270 WHAT IS COMING? 

Of course there is no denying that the Germans 
are a very distinctive people, as distinctive as the 
French. But their distinctions are not diabolical. 
Until the middle of the nineteenth century it was 
the fashion to regard them as a race of philosophi- 
cal incompetents. Their reputation as a people of 
exceptionally military quality sprang up in the 
weed-bed of human delusions between 1866 and 
1872 ; it will certainly not survive this war. Their 
reputation for organisation is another matter. 
They are an orderly, industrious, and painstaking 
people, they have a great respect for science, for 
formal education, and for authority. It is their 
respect for education which has chiefly betrayed 
them, and made them the instrument of Hohenzol- 
lern folly. Mr. F. M. Hueffer has shown this quite 
conclusively in his admirable but ill-named book, 
When Blood is Their Argument. Their minds 
have been systematically corrupted by base his- 
torical teaching, and the inculcation of a rancid 
patriotism. They are a people under the sway of 
organised suggestion. This catastrophic war and 
its preparation have been their chief business for 
half a century; none the less their peculiar quali- 
ties have still been displayed during that period; 
they have still been able to lead the world in several 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 271 

branches of social organisation and in the methodi- 
cal development of technical science. Systems of 
ideas are perhaps more readily shattered than 
built up; the aggressive patriotism of many Ger- 
mans must be already darkened by serious doubts, 
and I see no inherent impossibility in hoping that 
the mass of the Germans may be restored to the 
common sanity of mankind, even in the twenty or 
thirty years of life that perhaps still remain for me. 
Consider the names of the chief exponents of the 
aggressive German idea, and you will find that not 
one is German. The first begetter of Nietzsche's 
" blond beast," and of all that great flood of rub- 
bish about a strange superior race with whitish hair 
and blue eyes, that has so fatally rotted the Ger- 
man imagination, was a Frenchman named Gobi- 
neau. We British are not altogether free from the 
disease. As a small boy I read the History of J. 
R. Green, and fed my pride upon the peculiar vir- 
tues of my Anglo-Saxon blood. " Cp." as they say 
in footnotes, Carlyle and Froude. It was not a 
German but a renegade Englishman of the English- 
man-hating whig type, Mr. Houston Stewart Cham- 
berlain, who carried the Gobineau theory to that 
delirious level which claims Dante and Leonardo 
as Germans, and again it was not a German but a 



272 WHAT IS COMING? 

British peer, still among us, Lord Redesdale, who 
in his eulogistic preface to the English transla- 
tion of Chamberlain's torrent of folly, hinted not 
obscurely that the real father of Christ was not the 
Jew, Joseph, but a much more Germanic person. 
Neither Clausewitz, who first impressed upon the 
German mind the theory of ruthless warfare, nor 
Bernhardi, nor Treitschke, who did as much to 
build up the Emperor's political imagination, strike 
one as bearing particularly German names. There 
are indeed very grave grounds for the German com- 
plaint that Germany has been the victim of alien 
flattery and alien precedents. And what after all 
is the Prussian dream of world empire but an imi- 
tative response to the British Empire and the ad- 
venture of Napoleon. The very title of the Ger- 
man emperor is the name of an Italian, Caesar, far 
gone in decay. And the backbone of the German 
system at the present time is the Prussian, who is 
not really a German at all but a Germanised Wend. 
Take away the imported and imposed elements 
from the things we fight to-day, leave nothing but 
what is purely and originally German, and you 
leave very little. We fight dynastic ambition, na- 
tional vanity, greed, and the fruits of fifty years of 
basely conceived and efficiently conducted education. 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 273 

The majority of sensible and influential Eng- 
lishmen are fully aware of these facts. This does 
not alter their resolution to beat Germany thor- 
oughly and finally, and, if Germany remains Ho- 
henzollern after the war, to do their utmost to ring 
her in with commercial alliances, tariffs, navigation 
and exclusion laws that will keep her poor and 
powerless and out of mischief so long as her vice 
remains in her. But these considerations of the 
essential innocence of the German do make all this 
systematic hostility, which the British have had 
forced upon them, a very uncongenial and reluc- 
tant hostility. Pro-civilisation, and not Anti-Ger- 
man, is the purpose of the Allies. And the specu- 
lation of just how relentlessly and for how long 
this ring of suspicion and precaution need be main- 
tained about Germany, of how soon the German 
may decide to become once more a good European, 
is one of extraordinary interest to every civilised 
man. In other words, what are the prospects of a 
fairly fundamental revolution in German life and 
thought and affairs in the years immediately be- 
fore us? 

§ 2 

In a sense every European country must undergo 
revolutionary changes as a consequence of the enor- 



274 WHAT IS COMING? 

mous economic exhaustion and social dislocations 
of this war. But what I propose to discuss here is 
the possibility of a real political revolution, in the 
narrower sense of the word, in Germany, a revolu- 
tion that will end the Hohenzollern system, the 
German dynastic system, altogether, that will dem- 
ocratise Prussia and put an end for ever to that 
secretive scheming of military aggressions which is 
the essential quarrel of Europe with Germany. It 
is the most momentous possibility of our times, be- 
cause it opens the way to an alternative state of 
affairs that may supersede the armed watching and 
systematic war of tariffs, prohibitions, and exclu- 
sions against the Central empires that must quite 
unavoidably be the future attitude of the Pledged 
Allies to any survival of the Hohenzollern empire. 
We have to bear in mind that in this discussion 
we are dealing with something very new and quite 
untried hitherto by anything but success, that new 
Germany whose unification began with the spolia- 
tion of Denmark and was completed at Versailles. 
It is not a man's lifetime old. Under the state 
socialism and aggressive militarism of the Hohen- 
zollern regime it had been led to a level of unex- 
ampled pride and prosperity, and it plunged shout- 
ing and singing into this war, confident of victories. 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 275 

It is still being fed with dwindling hopes of victory, 
no longer unstinted hopes, but still hopes — by a 
sort of political bread-card system. The hopes out- 
last the bread-and-butter, but they dwindle and 
dwindle. How is this parvenu people going to 
stand the cessation of hope, the realisation of the 
failure and fruitlessness of such efforts as no peo- 
ple on earth have ever made before? How are they 
going to behave when they realise fully that they 
have suffered and died and starved and wasted all 
their land in vain? When they learn too that the 
cause of the war was a trick, and the Russian inva- 
sion a lie? They have a large democratic Press 
that will not hesitate to tell them that, that does 
already to the best of its ability disillusion them. 
They are a carefully trained and educated and dis- 
ciplined people it is true ; * but the solicitude of 
the German Government everywhere apparent, thus 
to keep the resentment of the people directed to the 
proper quarter, is, I think, just one of the things 
that are indicative of the revolutionary possibilities 

* A recent circular, which Vorwaerts quotes sent by the edu- 
cation officials to the teachers of Frankfurt-am-Main points out 
the necessity of the " beautiful task " of inculcating a deep love 
for the House of Hohenzollern (Crown Prince, grin and all) and 
concludes, " All efforts to excuse or minimise or explain the 
disgraceful acts which our enemies have committed against Ger- 
mans all over the world are to be firmly opposed by you should 
you see any signs of these efforts entering the schools." 



276 WHAT IS COMING? 

in Germany. The Allied Governments let opinion, 
both in their own countries and in America, shift 
for itself ; they do not even trouble to mitigate the 
inevitable exasperation of the military censorship 
by an intelligent and tactful control. The German 
Government, on the other hand, has organised the 
putting of the blame upon other shoulders than its 
own elaborately and ably from the very beginning 
of the war. It must know its own people best, and 
I do not see why it should do this if there were not 
very dangerous possibilities ahead for itself in the 
national temperament. 

It is one of the commonplaces of this question 
that in the past the Germans have always been loyal 
subjects and never made a revolution. It is al- 
leged that there has never been a German republic. 
That is by no means conclusively true. The 
nucleus of Swiss freedom was the German-speaking 
cantons about the Lake of Lucerne ; Tell was a Ger- 
man, and he was glorified by the German Schiller. 
No doubt the Protestant reformation was largely a 
business of dukes and princes, but the underlying 
spirit of that revolt also lay in the German national 
character. The Anabaptist insurrection was no 
mean thing in rebellions, and the history of the 
Dutch, who are, after all, only the extreme expres- 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 277 

sion of the Low German type, is a history of the 
most stubborn struggle for freedom in Europe. 
This legend of German docility will not bear close 
examination. It is true that they are not given to 
spasmodic outbreaks, and that they do not lend 
themselves readily to intrigues and pronuncia- 
mentos, but there is every reason to suppose that 
they have the heads to plan and the wills to carry 
out as sound and orderly and effective a revolution 
as any people in Europe. Before the war drove 
them frantic, the German comic papers were by no 
means suggestive of an abject worship of authority 
and royalty for their own sakes. The teaching of 
all forms of morality and sentimentality in schools 
produces not only belief, but reaction, the live- 
lier and more energetic the pupil the more likely 
he is to react rather than accept. Whatever the 
feelings of the old women of Germany may be to- 
wards the Kaiser and his family, my impression of 
the opinion of Germans in general is that they be- 
lieved firmly in empire, Kaiser and militarism, 
wholly and solely because they thought these things 
meant security, success, triumph, more and more 
wealth, more and more Germany, and all that had 
come to them since 1871 carried on to the nth de- 
gree. ... I do not think that all the schoolmasters 



278 WHAT IS COMING? 

of Germany, teaching in unison at the tops of their 
voices, will sustain that belief beyond the end of this 
war. 

At present every discomfort and disappointment 
of the German people is being sedulously diverted 
into rage against the Allies, and particularly 
against the English. This is all very well as long 
as the war goes on with a certain effect of hopeful- 
ness. But what when presently the beam has so 
tilted against Germany that an unprofitable peace 
has become urgent and inevitable? How can the 
Hohenzollern suddenly abandon his pose of right- 
eous indignation and make friends with the ac- 
cursed enemy, and how can he make any peace at 
all with us while he still proclaims us accursed? 
Either the Emperor has to go to his people and say, 
" We promised you victory and it is defeat," or he 
has to say, " It is not defeat, but we are going to 
make peace with these Kussian barbarians who in- 
vaded us, with the incompetent English who be- 
trayed us, with all these degenerate and contempt- 
ible races you so righteously hate and despise, upon 
such terms that we shall never be able to attack 
them again. This noble and wonderful war is to 
end in this futility and — these graves. You were 
tricked into it, as you were tricked into war in 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 279 

1870 — but this time it has not turned out quite so 
well. And besides, after all, we find we can con- 
tinue to get on with these people." . . . 

In either case, I do not see how he can keep the 
habitual and cultivated German hate pointing 
steadily away from himself. So long as the war is 
going on that may be done, but when the soldiers 
come home the hate will come home as well. In 
times of war peoples may hate abroad and with 
some unanimity. But after the war, with no war 
going on or any prospect of a fresh war, with every 
exploiter and every industrial tyrant who has made 
his unobtrusive profits while the country scowled 
and spat at England, stripped of the cover of that 
excitement, then it is inevitable that much of this 
noble hate of England will be seen for the cant it 
is. The cultivated hate of the war phase, rein- 
forced by the fresh hate born of confusion and 
misery, will swing loose, as it were, seeking dis- 
persedly for objects. The petty, incessant irrita- 
tions of proximity will count for more; the na- 
tional idea for less. The Hohenzollerns and the 
Junkers will have to be very nimble indeed if the 
German accomplishment of hate does not swing 
round upon them. 

It is a common hypothesis with those who specu- 



280 WHAT IS COMING? 

late on the probable effects of these disillusion- 
ments, that Germany may break up again into its 
component parts. It is pointed out that Germany 
is, so to speak, a palimpsest, that the broad design 
of the great black eagle and the imperial crown 
are but newly painted over a great number of par- 
ticularisms, and that these particularisms may re- 
turn. The empire of the Germans may break up 
again. That I do not believe. The forces that uni- 
fied Germany lie deeper than the Hohenzollern ad- 
venture; print, paper and the spoken word have 
bound Germany now into one people for all time. 
None the less those previous crowns and symbols 
that still show through the paint of the new design 
may help greatly, as that weakens under the coming 
stresses, to disillusion men about its necessity. 
There was, they will be reminded, a Germany be- 
fore Prussia, before Austria for the matter of that. 
The empire has been little more than the first Ger- 
man experiment in unity. It is a new-fangled thing 
that came and may go again — leaving Germany 
still a nation, still with the sense of a common 
Fatherland. 

Let us consider a little more particularly the na- 
ture of the mass of population whose collective ac- 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 281 

tion in the years immediately ahead of us we are 
now attempting to forecast. Its social strata are 
only very inexactly equivalent to those in the coun- 
tries of the Pledged Allies. First there are the 
masses of the people. In England for purposes of 
edification we keep up the legend of the extreme 
efficiency of Germany, the high level of German 
education, and so forth. The truth is that the aver- 
age elementary education of the common people in 
Britain is- superior to that of Germany, that the 
domestic efficiency of the British common people is 
greater, their moral training better, and their per- 
sonal quality higher. This is shown by a number 
of quite conclusive facts of which I will instance 
merely the higher German general death rate, the 
higher German infantile death rate, the altogether 
disproportionate percentage of crimes of violence in 
Germany, and the indisputable personal superiority 
of the British private soldier over his German anta- 
gonist. It is only when we get above the level of 
the masses that the position is reversed. The ratio 
of public expenditure upon secondary and higher 
education in Germany as compared with the ex- 
penditure upon elementary education is out of all 
proportion to the British ratio. Directly we come 



282 WHAT IS COMING? 

to the commercial, directive, official, technical and 
professional classes in Germany, we come to classes 
far more highly trained, more alert intellectually, 
more capable of collective action, and more ac- 
cessible to general ideas, than the less numerous 
and less important corresponding classes in Brit- 
ain. This great German middle class is the 
strength and substance of the new Germany ; it has 
increased proportionally to the classes above and 
below it, it has developed almost all its character- 
istics during the last half century. At its lower 
fringe it comprehends the skilled and scientifically 
trained artisans, it supplies the brains of social 
democracy, and it reaches up to the world of finance 
and quasi-state enterprise. And it is the " dark 
horse " in all these speculations. 

Hitherto this middle class has been growing al- 
most unawares. It has been so busy coming into 
existence and growing, there has been so much to 
do since 1871, that it has had scarcely a moment 
to think round the general problem of politics at 
all. It has taken the new empire for granted as a 
child takes its home for granted, and its state of 
mind to-day must be rather like that of an intelli- 
gent boy who suddenly discovers that his father's 
picturesque and wonderful speculations have led 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 283 

to his arrest and brought the brokers into the house, 
and that there is nothing for it but to turn to and 
take control of the family affairs. 

In Germany, the most antiquated and the most 
modern of European States, the old dynastic Ger- 
many of the princes and junkers has lasted on by 
virtue of exceptional successes and prestige into 
the world of steel and electricity. But their pres- 
tige has paled before the engineering of Krupp; 
their success evaporates. A new nation awakens 
to self-consciousness only to find itself betrayed 
into apparently irreconcilable hostility against the 
rest of mankind. . . . 

What will be the quality of the monarch and 
court and junkerdom that will face this awaking 
new Germany? 

The monarch will be before very long the present 
Crown Prince. The Hohenzollerns have at least 
the merit of living quickly, and the present Em- 
peror draws near his allotted term. He will break 
a record in his family if he lives another dozen 
years. So that quite soon after the war this new 
disillusioned Germany will be contemplating the 
imperial graces of the present Crown Prince. In 
every way he is an unattractive and uninspiring 
figure; he has identified himself completely with 



284 WHAT IS COMING? 

that militarism that has brought about the Euro- 
pean catastrophe; in repudiating him Germany 
will repudiate her essential offence against civilisa- 
tion, and his appears to be the sort of personality 
that it is a pleasure to repudiate. He or some 
kindred regent will be the symbol of royalty in Ger- 
many through all those years of maximum stress 
and hardship ahead. Throughout the greater part 
of Germany the tradition of loyalty to his house is 
not a century old. And the real German loyalty 
is racial and national far more than dynastic. It 
is not the Hohenzollern over all that they sing 
about; it is Deutschland. (And — as in the case 
of all imperfectly civilised peoples — songs of hate 
for foreigners.) But it needed a decadent young 
American to sing: 

*' Thou Prince of Peace, 
Thou God of War," 

to the dismal rhetorician of Potsdam. Real em- 
perors reconcile and consolidate peoples, for an em- 
pire is not a nation; but the Hohenzollerns have 
never dared to be anything but sedulously na- 
tional, " echt Deutsch " and advocates of black- 
letter. They know the people they have to deal 
with. 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 285 

This new substantial middle mass of Germany 
has never been on friendly terms with the Germany 
of the court and the landowner. It has inherited 
a burgerlich tradition and resented even while it 
tolerated the swagger of the aristocratic officer. It 
tolerated it because that sort of thing was supposed 
to be necessary to the national success. But Mu- 
nich, the comic papers, Herr Harden, Yorwaerts, 
speak, I think, for the central masses of German 
life, far more truly than any official utterances do. 
They speak in a voice a little gross, very sensible, 
blunt, with a kind of heavy humour. That Ger- 
man voice one may not like, but one must needs re- 
spect it. It is at any rate not bombastic. It is 
essentially honest. When the imperial eagle comes 
home with half its feathers out like a crow that has 
met a bear ; when the surviving aristocratic officers 
reappear with a vastly diminished swagger in the 
biergartens, I believe that the hitherto acquiescent 
middle classes and skilled artisan class of Germans 
will entirely disappoint those people who expect 
them to behave either with servility or sentimental 
loyalty. The great revolutionary impulse of the 
French was passionate and generous. The revolu- 
tionary impulse of Germany may be even more 



286 WHAT IS COMING? 

deadly; it may be contemptuous. It may be they 
will not even drag emperor and nobles down; they 
will shove them aside. . . . 

In all these matters one must ask the reader to 
enlarge his perspectives at least as far back as the 
last three centuries. The galaxy of German mon- 
archies that has overspread so much of Europe is a 
growth of hardly more than two centuries. It is a 
phase in the long process of the break-up of the 
Roman Empire and of the catholic system that in- 
herited its tradition. These royalties have formed 
a class apart, breeding only among themselves, and 
attempting to preserve a sort of caste international- 
ism in the face of an advance in human intelligence, 
a spread of printing, reading, and writing that 
makes inevitably for the recrudescence of national 
and race feeling, and the increasing participation 
of the people in government. In Russia and Eng- 
land alike these originally German dynasties are 
meeting the problems of the new time by becoming 
national. They modify themselves from year to 
year. The time when Britain will again have a 
Queen of British race may not be very remote. 
The days when the affairs of Europe could be dis- 
cussed at Windsor in German and from a German 
standpoint ended with the death of Queen Victoria, 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 287 

and it is only in such improvised courts as those of 
Greece and Bulgaria that the national outlook can 
still be contemplated from a foreign standpoint and 
discussed in a foreign tongue. The age when the 
monarchical system made the courts of three-quar- 
ters of Europe a German's Fatherland has ended 
for ever. And with that, the last rational advan- 
tage of monarchy and royalist sentimentality dis- 
appears from the middle-class German's point of 
view. 

So it seems to me that the following conclusions 
about the future of Germany emerge from these 
considerations. It is improbable that there will be 
any such revolution as overthrew French Imperial- 
ism in 1871 ; the new Prussian imperialism is closer 
to the tradition of the people and much more firmly 
established through the educational propaganda of 
the past half century. But liberal forces in Ger- 
many may nevertheless be strong enough to force a 
peace upon the Hohenzollern empire so soon as any 
hopes of aggressive successes die away, before the 
utmost stage of exhaustion is reached, early in 
1917 perhaps or at latest in 1918. This, we sup- 
pose, will be a restrictive peace so far as Germany 
is concerned, humiliating her and hampering her 
development. The German press will talk freely 



288 WHAT IS COMING? 

of a revanche and the renewal of the struggle, and 
this will help to consolidate the Pledged Allies in 
their resolves to hold Germany on every front and 
to retard her economic and financial recovery. The 
dynasty will lose prestige gradually, the true story 
of the war will creep slowly into the German con- 
sciousness, and the idea of a middle-class republic, 
which like the French republic of the last forty -five 
years will be only defensively militant and essen- 
tially pacific and industrial, will become more and 
more popular in the country. This will have the 
support of strong journalists, journalists of the 
Harden type for example. The dynasty tends to 
become degenerate, so that the probability of either 
some gross scandals or an ill-advised reactionary 
movement back to absolutism may develop a crisis 
within a few years of the peace settlement. The 
mercantile and professional classes will join hands 
with the social democrats to remove the decaying 
incubus of the Hohenzollern system, and Germany 
will become a more modern and larger repetition 
of the Third French republic. This collapse of the 
Germanic monarchical system may spread consid- 
erably beyond the limits of the German empire. It 
will probably be effected without much violence as 
a consequence of the convergence and maturity of 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 289 

many streams of very obvious thought. Many of 
the monarchs concerned may find themselves still 
left with their titles, palaces, and personal estates, 
and merely deprived of their last vestiges of legal 
power. The way will thus be opened for a gradual 
renewal of good feeling between the people of Ger- 
many and the western Europeans. This renewal 
will be greatly facilitated by the inevitable fall in 
the German birth rate that the shortage and econ- 
omies of this war will have done much to promote, 
and by the correlated discrediting of the expan- 
sionist idea. By 1960 or so, the alteration of per- 
spectives will have gone so far that historians will 
be a little perplexed to explain the causes of the 
Great War. The militarist monomania of Ger- 
many will have become incomprehensible ; her Welt 
Politik literature incredible and unreadable. . . . 

Such is my reading of the German horoscope. 

I doubt if there will be nearly so much writing 
and reading about the Great War in the latter half 
of the twentieth century as there was about Na- 
poleon at the end of the nineteenth. The Great 
War is essentially undramatic; it has no hero, it 
has no great leaders. It is a story of the common- 
sense of humanity suppressing certain tawdry and 
vulgar ideas and ambitions, and readjusting much 



290 WHAT IS COMING? 

that was wasteful and unjust in social and eco- 
nomic organisation. It is the story of how the 
spirit of man was awakened by a nightmare of a 
War Lord. . . . The nightmare will fade out of 
mind, and the spirit of man will set about the reali- 
ties of life with revivified energies, will set itself 
to the establishment of order, the increase of knowl- 
edge and creation. Amid these realities the great 
qualities of the Germans mark them for a distin- 
guished and important role. 

§ 3 

The primary business of the Allies is not reconcil- 
iation with Germany. Their primary concern is 
to organise a great League of Peace about the 
world with which the American States and China 
may either unite or establish a permanent under- 
standing. Separate attempts to restore friendship 
with the Germans will threaten the unanimity of 
the League of Peace, and perhaps renew the in- 
trigues and evils of the Germanic dynastic system 
which this war may destroy. The essential resto- 
ration of Germany must be the work of German 
men speaking plain sense to Germans, and inducing 
their country to hold out its hand not to this or 
that suspicious neighbour but to mankind. A mili- 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS 291 

tarist Germany is a Germany self-condemned to 
isolation or world empire. A Germany which has 
returned to the ways of peace, on the other hand, 
will be a country that cannot be kept out of the 
system of civilisation. The tariff wall cannot but 
be lowered, the watchful restrictions cannot but be 
discontinued against such a Germany. Europe is 
a system with its heart half used, so long as Ger- 
many is isolated. The German population is and 
will remain the central and largest mass of people 
in Europe. That is a fact as necessary as the 
Indianism of India. To reconstruct modern civil- 
isation without Germany would be a colossal arti- 
ficial task that would take centuries to do. It is 
inconceivable that Germany will stand out of Eu- 
ropeanism so long as to allow the trade routes of 
the world to be entirely deflected from her. Her 
own necessities march with the natural needs of 
the world. 

So that I give the alliance for the isolation of 
Germany at the outside a life of forty years before 
it ceases to be necessary through the recovered 
willingness of the Germans to lay aside aggression. 

But this is not a thing to be run at too hastily. 
It may be easily possible to delay this national gen- 
eral reconciliation of mankind by an unreal effu- 



292 WHAT IS COMING? 

sion. There will be no advantage in forcing the 
feelings of the late combatants. It is ridiculous to 
suppose that for the next decade or so, whatever 
happens, any Frenchmen are going to feel genial 
about the occupation of their northeast provinces, 
or any Belgians smile at the memory of Dinant or 
Louvain, or the Poles or Serbs forgive the desola- 
tion of their country, or any* English or Russians 
take a humorous view of the treatment their peo- 
ple have had as prisoners in Germany. So long as 
these are living memories they will keep a barrier 
of dislike about Germany. Nor is it probable that 
the ordinary German is going to survey the revised 
map of Africa with a happy sense of relief, or 
blame no one but himself for the vanished pros- 
perity of 1914. That is asking too much of hu- 
manity. Unless I know nothing of Germany, Ger- 
many will bristle with " denkmals " to keep open 
all such sores. The dislike of Germany by the al- 
lied nations will be returned in the hostility of a 
thwarted and disappointed people. Not even the 
neutrals will be aloof from these hostilities and re- 
sentments. The world will still be throwing much 
passion into the rights and wrongs of the sinking 
of the Lusitania in 1950 or so. There will be a bit- 
terness in the memories of this and the next gen- 



THE OUTLOOK FOE THE GERMANS 293 

eration, that will make the spectacle of ardent 
Frenchmen or Englishmen or Belgians or Russians 
embracing Germans with gusto — unpleasant to 
say the least of it. We may bring ourselves to 
understand, we may bring ourselves to a cold and 
reasonable forgiveness, we may suppress our Sir 
George Makgills and so forth, but it will take sixty 
or seventy years for the two sides in this present 
war to grow kindly again. Let us build no false 
hopes nor pretend to any false generosities. These 
hatreds can die out only in one way : by the passing 
of a generation, by the dying out of the wounded 
and the wronged. Our business, our unsentimen- 
tal business, is to set about establishing such con- 
ditions that they will so die out. And that is the 
business of the sane Germans too. Behind the bar- 
riers this war will have set up between Germany 
and anti-Germany, the intelligent men in either 
camp must prepare the ultimate peace they will 
never enjoy, must work for the days when their sons 
at least may meet as they themselves can never meet, 
without accusation or resentment, upon the com- 
mon business of the World Peace. That is not to 
be done by any conscientious sentimentalities, any 
slobbering denials of unforgettable injuries. We 
want no Pro-German Leagues any more than we 



294 WHAT IS COMING? 

want Anti-German Leagues. We want patience — 
and silence. 

My reason insists upon the inevitableness and 
necessity of this ultimate reconciliation. I will do 
no more than I must to injure Germany further, 
and I will do all that I can to restore the unity of 
mankind. None the less is it true that for me for 
all the rest of my life the Germans I shall meet, 
the German things I shall see, will be smeared with 
the blood of my people and my friends that the wil- 
fulness of Germany has spilt. 



THE END 



Printed in the United States of America. 



T 



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